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Lang Andrew
Magic and Religion

All this time one tribe of Central Australia, the Arunta, remains resolutely godless 'in spite of all temptations to join denominations' of a religious character. For the Arunta live in the worst country, the most rainless, and therefore their magic is most manifestly a failure. Yet, unlike the natives of South-Eastern Australia (where magic is most successful), the Arunta cling to magic, and have developed no religion. If so, as of all rain-making magic theirs is about the most unsuccessful, they must be very stupid, or they would detect the failure, and fly to religion, 'a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage.' The Arunta are very far from stupid; they have the most complete and adequate of savage metaphysics. If, then, they have not approached superior powers, in face of the failure of their magic, it may be that they have tried and discarded religion. 'Religion for the women and the children, magic for men' appears to be the Arunta motto: not so very uncivilised! This I suggest because Mr. Frazer tells us that at the initiatory rites of the Arunta 'the women and children believe that the roaring noise' of the wooden slat, tied to a string and swung about, is 'the voice of the great spirit Twanyirika.'⁹³ A great spirit (above all if spelled with capital letters) is rather a religious conception. 'This spirit, the women are told, lives in wild and inaccessible regions… Both uninitiated youths and women are taught to believe in the existence of Twanyirika.' So write Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, our only sources.⁹⁴

A brief note is all that these inquirers give in their copious book to the great spirit. 'This belief,' they say, 'is fundamentally the same as that found in all Australian tribes.' Now in the tribes reported on by Mr. Howitt, the spirit whose voice is the sound of the slat or bull roarer called the tundun, and by other names, is the son or other deputy of Baiame, or some such powerful good being, Mungan-ngaur, Pirnmeheal, Bunjil, Noorele, or by whatever style he may be called. One of his duties is to superintend the Bora, or mysteries of the tribes. The Wiraijuri believe that their type of Twanyirika was destroyed, for misconduct, by his superior, Baiame. This sinful great spirit was called Daramulun, but in other tribes Daramulun is apparently the superior, and goes on existing. He is, says Mr. Howitt, 'the Great Master,' 'the Father,' the sky dweller, the institutor of society, the power whose voice 'calls to the rain to fall and make the grass green.' He is the moral being for whom 'the boys are made so that Daramulun likes them' – a process involving cries of nga ('good'), so says Mr. Howitt. His attributes and powers (where he is supreme) 'are precisely those of Baiame,' who, by Mr. Ridley and many others, is spoken of as a maker, if I may not say creator. It was in 1854, two years before publishing his 'Gurre Kamilaroi' (in which 'Baiame' was used for 'God'), that Mr. Ridley asked a Kamilaroi man, 'Do you know Baiame?' He said, Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda ('I have not seen Baiame; I have heard, or perceived him. They hear him in the thunder'). Among this tribe Daramulun was not the superior; he was 'author of disease and medical skill, of mischief and wisdom also; he appears in the form of a serpent at their assemblies,' like Asclepius and the American Hobamok.⁹⁵ Though Mr. Ridley is a missionary, I venture to cite him, because his evidence goes back nearly fifty years, to a time when the blacks had less contact with Europeans. Moreover, Mr. Ridley is corroborated by Mr. Howitt and other laymen, while Mr. Frazer even prefers the evidence of a German missionary to that of Mr. Gason, a lay Englishman of the greatest experience. Mr. Howitt finds, among the Kurnai, Tundun as the patron of the mysteries and the bull roarer, like Twanyirika. In Mr. Manning's tribe⁹⁶ the same rôle is taken by Moodgeegally, under the control of Boyma.

We have thus five or six parallels to the Twanyirika of the godless Arunta, and all are subordinate to a higher power. If then, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen tell us, the belief in the Arunta Twanyirika, the great spirit, 'is fundamentally the same as that found in all the Australian tribes,' Twanyirika ought to have a much more powerful benevolent superior. In that case the Arunta would as Clough says. If so, as they do not propitiate him, they did not conceive him as a partner in the game of Do ut des. But our only witnesses, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, are extremely reticent about Twanyirika. Nothing is said about his having a superior, and I assume that he has none. It seems to follow that he is a mere Mumbo Jumbo, or bogle, devised by the men to keep the women and children in order.

 
Incline to think there is a god,
Or something very like one,
 

But in South-Eastern Australia (if I may trust Mr. Howitt's evidence, to which Mr. Frazer does not here allude) the counterpart of Twanyirika is a mere servant of a much higher being, everywhere called by names meaning 'our father.' Therefore either 'our father' Baiame, Mungan-ngaur, and the rest, have been developed out of a sportive bugbear like Twanyirika, or Twanyirika (if he really has no superior) is a rudimentary survival of a belief like that in Mungan-ngaur, and his subordinate, Tundun. In the former case Twanyirika, a germ of the more advanced religion of South-Eastern Australia, was not invented as a power behind nature, who might be useful if propitiated, as in Mr. Frazer's theory. In the latter case the Arunta do not represent man prior to religion (as Mr. Frazer holds), but man who has cast off religion. But Mr. Frazer does not seem to notice this dilemma.

The evidence for what most people call 'religion' among the Australian natives is so far from scanty that one finds it when looking for other matters, as I am going to show. True, in the following report the religion does not answer to Mr. Frazer's definition, no powerful being is here said to be conciliated or propitiated: he is only said to exist and favour morality. But Mr. Frazer's definition, if pressed, produces the effect of arguing in a vicious circle. His theory asserts that powerful beings are only invented by man, in view of man's tardy discovery that his own magic is powerless. The invented beings are then propitiated, for selfish ends, and that, by the definition, is religion.

If we produce, as we do, evidence that the belief in powerful beings has been evolved, and yet that these beings are certainly not propitiated by sacrifice, and seldom if ever by prayer, that they are only won by conduct, and by rites not involving sacrifice, Mr. Frazer can reply, 'Perhaps; but by my definition that kind of belief is not religion.' Then what is it? 'What else can you call it?' Its existence, if proved, is fatal to Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of religion in the despair of magic, because the faithful of the belief of which I speak do not usually implore the god to do for them what magic has failed to do. Their belief satisfies their speculative and moral needs: it does not exist to supply their temporal wants. Yet it is none the less, but much the more, a religion on that account, except by Mr. Frazer's definition. If religion is to be defined as he defines it, 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man,' and so on, religion can only have arisen as it does in his theory, setting aside a supernormal revelation. But if we do not deny the name of religion to the speculative belief in a power superior to man, and to the moral belief that he lends a supernormal sanction to conduct, and to the emotional belief that he loves his children, then the belief is religion, but something other than religion as defined by Mr. Frazer. Nobody will deny the name of religion to such a belief. Mr. Frazer says: 'I would ask those who dissent from my conclusions to make sure that they mean the same thing by religion that I do; for otherwise the difference between us may be more apparent than real.'⁹⁷

I mean by religion what Mr. Frazer means – and more. The conciliation of higher powers by prayer and sacrifice is religion, but it need not be the whole of religion. The belief in a higher power who sanctions conduct, and is a father and a loving one to mankind, is also religion; few, if any, will dispute the fact. But this belief, if unaccompanied, as in Australia, by prayer and sacrifice, cannot be accounted for on Mr. Frazer's theory: that religion was invented, for worldly ends, after the recognised failure of magic, which aimed at the same ends fruitlessly. It is only by limiting his definition of religion, as he does, that he can establish his theory of the origin of religion. It is only by omitting mention of the evidence for what nobody else can deny to be religion, that he can secure his theory.

I return to my additional evidence for Australian religion. As will be seen, it does not come within Mr. Frazer's definition, but will anybody deny that the belief is religious? The evidence is that of Mr. A. L. P. Cameron,⁹⁸ and contains a brief comparative glossary of words used by different tribes of New South Wales to indicate the same objects. Mr. Cameron had been interested in the black fellows since 1868 at least, when their numbers were much larger than at present. He had seen gatherings of from 800 to 1,000. The tribes chiefly in question dwelt along the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers, and do not include the Kamilaroi, the Kurnai, and Coast Murring of whom Mr. Howitt speaks.

As to religion, ghosts of the dead are believed to visit the earth, and to be frequently seen. The blacks 'will often resort to peculiar devices to avoid mentioning the names of the dead,' a practice hostile to the development of ancestor worship. No ghost of a man can grow into a god if his name is tabooed and therefore forgotten. 'The people of all these tribes appear to have a belief in a Deity, and in a future state of some kind.' The Wathi Wathi call this being Tha-tha-pali; the Ta-ta-thi call him Tulong. Mr. Cameron could not obtain translations of these names, any more than we know the meaning of the names Apollo or Artemis. The being 'is regarded as a powerful spirit, or perhaps a supreme supernatural being. They say that he came from the far north, and now lives in the sky. He told each tribe what language they were to speak. He made men, women, and dogs, and the latter used to talk, but he took the power of speech from them. The Ta-ta-thi do not care to speak much of Tulong, and say that he does not often come to the earth. Although it seems that in many of the Australian tribes there is only a very dim idea as to the attributes of the Supreme Being and of a future state, yet in the Ta-ta-thi and its allied tribes there is certainly a belief not only in a future state of existence, but also in a system of rewards and punishments. My Ta-ta-thi informant stated that one of the doctors ascended long ago through the sky, and there saw a place where wicked men were roasted.'

Mr. Cameron, of course, had the strongest suspicions of a 'place' so ostensibly Christian. To this we return.⁹⁹

These tribes practise the Bora rites or initiatory mysteries. If women witness them 'the penalty is death. The penalty for revealing the secrets is probably the same.' Mr. Cameron, unlike Mr. Howitt, has not been initiated, and does not know the full secret. The presiding being (like the Twanyirika of the Arunta) is called Thuremlin, who, I conjecture, is Daramulun in his subordinate capacity. 'Their belief in the power of Thuremlin is undoubted, whereas the Arunta adults do not appear to believe in Twanyirika, a mere bugbear of the women and children. The bull roarer is Kalari, or among the Ta-ta-thi Kalk [or Kallak] – that is to say, "word."' Concerning the instruction given to the boys, and described by Mr. Howitt, Mr. Cameron, not being initiated, gives no information.

As to the future life, Mr. Cameron received his account from a tribesman named Makogo, 'an intelligent member of the Wathi Wathi tribe.' The belief was that current 'before his people came into contact with Europeans, and Makogo expressed an opinion that, whether right or wrong, they would have been better off now had their beliefs never been disturbed.' Probably Makogo was right. The beliefs were in a future state of reward or punishment. European contact does not import but destroy the native form of this creed.

The Wathi Wathi belief answers in character to the creeds expressed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Fijian hymns, the famous Orphic gold talisman of Petilia, the Red Indian belief published by Kohl, and to many other examples.¹⁰⁰ The Way of Souls, as in these ancient or savage beliefs, is beset by dangers and temptations, to which the Egyptian Book of the Dead is a guide-book. If any one desires to maintain that this Australian idea, held before contact with Europeans, and now to some extent abandoned after that contact, is of Christian origin (we know this argument), he must suppose that the Wathi Wathi adapted the idea from our old 'Lyke Wake Dirge:'

 
When Brig o' Dread is over and past,
Every night and all,
To Whinny Muir thou comest at last,
And Christ receive thy saul.
 

A weak point there is. The soul of the Wathi Wathi, after death, is met by another soul, 'who directs him to the road for good men.'

But the natives had no roads, the opponent will reply. They have trade routes and markets, however, and barter of articles made in special localities goes on across hundreds of miles of country.¹⁰¹ Let us allow that the Wathi Wathi may know a clean path or track from a dirty one.

The soul meets a dirty and a clean path. The good soul, being instructed, chooses the dirty path: the other path is kept clean by bad spirits 'in order to induce the unthinking to follow it,' as Bunyan's Mr. Ignorance unwarily chose a by-path into hell. The soul next meets a woman who tries to seduce him. He escapes her lures, and comes to two women who try to trip him by whirling a rope. One of them is blind, and the soul evades her. Next comes a deep narrow gap, in which flames rise and fall. The good soul watches the fall of the flames, and leaps across; there is no Brig o' Dread. Bed Indian souls cross by a log which nearly spans the abyss. Two old women meet the good soul, and take him 'to the Deity, Tha-Tha-Puli.' He tests the soul's strength and skill by making him throw a nulla-nulla. 'When the Wathi Wathi see a shooting star, they believe it to be the passage of such a nulla-nulla through space, and say: "Tha-Tha-Puli is trying the strength of some new spirit." The soul of a bad man, if it escapes the traps set for it, is sure to fall into the hell of fire. Many of the natives have had their beliefs modified by contact with the whites,' and I 'feel doubtful,' says Mr. Cameron, 'whether the pit of fire was not of this kind, and questioned my informant very closely on the subject, but he assured me that there was no doubt whatever that the above was the exact belief before the settlement of the country by the white men.'

It is the standing reply of believers in the borrowing theory that a native, cross-examined, will always agree with whatever the European inquirer wishes him to say. The natives examined by Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Langloh Parker, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Manning, and others were exceptions. They would not allow that their beliefs were borrowed.

This particular form of native belief is exactly analogous to that of ancient Egypt, of Greece, of Fiji, and so on: not to the doctrine of our missionaries. The believers in borrowing must therefore say that the Wathi Wathi stole heaven, hell, and the ways thither from missionaries, and adapted them, accidentally coinciding with Egyptians, Greeks, Red Indians, Fijians, Aztecs, and the rest, as to a gulf to be crossed, and temptations on the way to the abode of the powerful being and the souls of the good. The native proverbial explanation of a shooting star establishes, as historical fact, their belief in Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good spirits. Mr. Frazer has six pages on beliefs about shooting stars.[54] One case is to our point. The Yerrunthally of Queensland think that the souls of the dead climb to a place among the stars by a rope; when they let the rope fall, it 'appeared to people on earth as a shooting star.'¹⁰²

Now if the evidence of Mr. Palmer, in the 'Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' is good evidence for this Australian belief, why is the evidence of Mr. Howitt and Mr. Cameron, in the same serial, to an unborrowed Australian religion (in this case with Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good souls) unworthy even of mention?

We fall back on Sir Alfred Lyall: 'I think that one effect of the accumulation of materials has been to encourage speculative generalisation, because it has provided a repertory out of which one may make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any theory.'¹⁰³ Here I have the pleasure of agreeing with this great authority. Mr. Frazer has chosen Australia as the home of magic, as a land where magic is, but religion has not yet been evolved. As I have shown, in this and the preceding paper, there is abundance of evidence for an unborrowed Australian religion. I shall abandon the evidence so soon as it is confuted, but I cannot reject it while the witnesses are treated as good on many other points, but are unmentioned just when their testimony, if true, seems inconsistent with a theory of the priority of magic to religion.

By the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers,' writes Mr. Tylor, 'it is known that the natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have ever since remained, a race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities.'¹⁰⁴ What can a young student commencing anthropologist think, when he compares Mr. Tylor's 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers' of Australian religion with Mr. Frazer's remark that there are 'some faint beginnings of religion' in Southern Australia, but that 'traces of a higher faith, where they occur, are probably sometimes due to European influence,' though the people, Mr. Tylor says, were in all things so 'saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities' – 'at their discovery'? There is no use in building a theory of the origin of religion on the case of Australia till we are at least told about the 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers.' That Mr. Frazer has some reason for disregarding the testimonies which I have cited, that he must have grounds for doubting their validity, I feel assured. But the grounds for the doubt are not apparent, and to state them would make Mr. Frazer's abstention intelligible.

IV
THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

Among the many recent theories concerning the origin of religion, certainly the most impressive is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ. Unlike several modern speculations, Mr. Frazer's is based on an extraordinary mass of erudition. We are not put off with vague and unvouched-for statements, or with familiar facts extracted from the collections of Mr. Tylor, Lord Avebury, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Frazer does not collect knowledge, as his Babylonian kings are supposed by him to have been sacrificed – by proxy. No writer is so erudite, and few are so exact in their references. While venturing to differ from Mr. Frazer, I must often, as it were, make use of his own ammunition in this war. Let me say sincerely that I am not pitting my knowledge or industry against his. I rather represent the student who has an interest in these subjects, and peruses 'The Golden Bough,' not as 'the general reader' does, but with some care, and with some verification of the citations and sources.

It is first necessary to state, as briefly as possible, Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the Divinity of our Lord, or, at least, as to what he thinks a very powerful factor in the evolution of that creed.

The Babylonians, he holds, and their Persian conquerors were wont yearly, at a vernal feast, to dress a condemned criminal in the royal robes, to enthrone him, to obey him, to grant him access to the ladies of the royal harem, and then, at the end of five days, to strip, whip, and hang him. The reason why they acted thus, Mr. Frazer guesses, was that the condemned man acted as proxy for the divine King of Babylon, who, in an age less civilised, had been sacrificed annually: so Mr. Frazer conjectures. The King was thus sacrificed as a being of divine or magical nature, a man-god, and the object, according to Mr. Frazer, was to keep providing the god or magical influence resident in him with a series of fresh human vehicles. It appears, or may appear, to be Mr. Frazer's opinion, though the point is stated rather casually and late in the long argument, that the King himself was believed to incarnate a known and recognised god of vegetation, a personal principle of vegetable life. The King's proxy, therefore, the condemned criminal, is sacrificed (by hanging) in a character at once royal (as representing the King) and divine (since the King incarnates a god). All this occurs, by one of the theories advanced, at about the time of year in which our Easter falls, at a feast called Zakmuk in Babylonian, in Persian (by the theory) Sacæa: a period of hard drinking and singular licence.

The Jews, by the theory, or by one of the theories, had probably no such feast or custom before they were carried into exile in Babylonia. But from the Babylonians and Persians Mr. Frazer holds that they probably borrowed the festival, which they styled Purim, and also borrowed the custom (historically unheard of among them) of crowning, stripping, flogging, and hanging a mock-king, a condemned criminal, in March. It does not appear that this man, in Judæa, was allowed to invade the harem, for example, of Herod, as in the case of the Persian royal harem. The Jews also are conjectured to have borrowed a practice, presumed by Mr. Frazer to have perhaps prevailed at Babylon, of keeping a pair of condemned criminals. One of them was hanged; the other was set free for the year. The first died as an incarnation of the god of vegetable life. The second, set free, represented in a pseudo-resurrection the first, and also represented, I understand, the revival of the god of vegetable life. The first man was called Haman, probably in origin Humman, a deity of the vanquished foes of Babylon, the Elamites. The second man, in Hebrew Mordecai, probably represented Merodach, or Marduk, the supreme god of the victorious Babylonians. Each man had a female consort, probably in Babylon a sacred harlot: Haman had Vashti, probably an Elamite goddess; Mordecai had Esther, doubtless Ishtar, the Venus of the Babylonian creed. These ladies do not occur in any account of the Babylonian or Persian feasts, nor in the Gospels: their existence is a conjecture.

The victims, as descending from the Babylonian and Persian criminals, who stood both for the king and also, at least in some parts of the theory, for a god of vegetation, were conceived of as divine. Since Christ, by what looks like a chapter of accidents, was put to death as one of these mock-kings, He inherited their recognised divinity, and His mission, which had been mainly that of a moral lecturer, at once was surrounded by a halo of divinity.

Such, in brief, if I follow Mr. Frazer, is the contention, which, I must repeat, is presented as the combination of many hypotheses into a single theory, offered for criticism.

To myself, after studying Mr. Frazer's theory with such care as it deserves, an hypothesis of its evolution presents itself. Before writing the first edition of 'The Golden Bough' (1890), Mr. Frazer had become acquainted with a statement which Dio Chrysostom, a Greek rhetorician of the first century, puts into the mouth of Diogenes the Cynic, in an imaginary dialogue with Alexander the Great. In this essay Diogenes is made to tell Alexander about the Persian custom of yearly dressing up a condemned criminal in royal robes, at the feast called Sacæa, allowing him to live 'like a king' for five days, giving him the entrée of the royal harem, and then stripping, scourging, and hanging or crucifying him. The resemblance of Dio's words to the account of the Mockery of Christ is very remarkable.

Mr. Frazer tells us that he saw this resemblance in 1890, but could not explain it. In 1897 he became acquainted with a legend, written in Greek, of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, a Roman Christian soldier, in Mœsia (303 A.D.). According to this legend, Dasius was drawn by lot as the yearly victim who, the story says, was made to represent King Saturnus, for a month of military revelry, and then was sacrificed, or obliged to slay himself, beside Saturn's altar, at the close of the Saturnalia. Dasius declined the part, and was put to death.

Here, then, in Mœsia, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius, was a mock-king, personating a god, sacrificed to a god, and therefore himself, it may be, regarded as divine. At the other extreme, in Jerusalem, was Christ, who, after mock royal honours, was scourged, crucified, and acquired a halo of divinity. The middle term was the criminal, who, in the character of a mock-king, was stripped, scourged, and hanged in the Persian feast. There was no trace in Persia of sacrifice, of a victim in the technical sense, or of any halo of divinity. But Mr. Frazer was familiar with barbaric kings who are or were put to death, to save them from dying naturally, or after a fixed term of years. In his opinion they are killed to provide the god whom they incarnate with a fresh vehicle. Combining all these facts, and strongly drawn by the resemblance of Dio's anecdote to the narratives of the Crucifixion, Mr. Frazer adopted the argument that the criminal executed at the Sacæa, in Babylon, had once been, like the Saturn sufferer in Mœsia, a divine victim, not at first hanged, but sacrificed yearly, to redeem the life of the Persian king, who in earlier ages must himself have been a yearly sacrifice. The divinity inherited by the criminal from that divine King was transmitted by a succession of executed malefactors to the victim of Calvary.

The ingenuity of the idea is undeniable. But it appears to me that the author's mind was throughout unconsciously drawn to the Crucifixion. This attraction became a 'mental prepossession.' In a recent work, 'Fact and Fable in Psychology' (Boston, U.S., 1900), Professor Jastrow has illustrated 'mental prepossession' by a common and trivial experience. A beginner in the art of bicycling is unconsciously drawn into collision with every obstacle on the road which his conscious self is doing its best to avoid.

In the same way, I fancy, our author's mind was led straight to an explanation of the halo of divinity round the Cross, instead of to what was needed first, an explanation of the Persian custom, isolated, and examined only in the light of its attendant circumstances, as described in our very scanty information. Had our author examined the circumstances of the Persian custom with an intellect unattracted by the hope of throwing new light on the Crucifixion, and uninfluenced by a tendency to find gods of vegetation almost every where, he would have found, I think, that they admit of being accounted for in a simple manner, granting that our information is true. There was, as far as we are informed, no sacrifice at the Sacæa, and in that Persian festival nothing religious. The religious element has to be imported by aid of remote inference, daring conjecture, and even, I venture to say, some disregard of documentary history.

The consequence, as I shall try to show, is that the theory has, in the Regent Moray's words, 'to pass over the bellies' of innumerable obstacles, by aid of a series of conjectures increasing in difficulty. Thus the reader's powers of acquiescence are strained afresh at the introduction of each new trial of his faith. If one stage out of so many stages of remote inference and bold presumption is unstable, the whole edifice falls to the ground. Meanwhile we shall have to offer a simple explanation of the circumstances of the Sacæan victim, only in a single instance demanding the use of one of Mr. Frazer's own conjectures, itself a legitimate hypothesis. The remainder of this essay is concerned with an examination of the difficulties of his theory, and of the 'bridges of hypothesis,' by which the 'yawning chasms' are to be crossed.