CHAPTER IV
The Moral Elements of Civilization

SINCE no society can exist without order, and no order without regulation, we may take it as a rule of history that the power of custom varies inversely as the multiplicity of laws, much as the power of instinct varies inversely as the multiplicity of thoughts. Some rules are necessary for the game of life; they may differ in different groups, but within the group they must be essentially the same. These rules may be conventions, customs, morals, or laws. Conventions are forms of behavior found expedient by a people; customs are conventions accepted by successive generations, after natural selection through trial and error and elimination; morals are such customs as the group considers vital to its welfare and development. In primitive societies, where there is no written law, these vital customs or morals regulate every sphere of human existence, and give stability and continuity to the social order. Through the slow magic of time such customs, by long repetition, become a second nature in the individual; if he violates them he feels a certain fear, discomfort or shame; this is the origin of that conscience, or moral sense, which Darwin chose as the most impressive distinction between animals and men.¹ In its higher development conscience is social consciousness—the feeling of the individual that he belongs to a group, and owes it some measure of loyalty and consideration. Morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and of each group with some larger whole. Civilization, of course, would be impossible without it.

I. MARRIAGE

The meaning of marriage—Its biological origins—Sexual communism—Trial marriage—Group marriage—Individual marriage—Polygamy—Its eugenic value—Exogamy—Marriage by service—By capture—By purchase—Primitive love—The economic function of marriage

The first task of those customs that constitute the moral code of a group is to regulate the relations of the sexes, for these are a perennial source of discord, violence, and possible degeneration. The basic form of this sexual regulation is marriage, which may be defined as the association of mates for the care of offspring. It is a variable and fluctuating institution, which has passed through almost every conceivable form and experiment in the course of its history, from the primitive care of offspring without the association of mates to the modern association of mates without the care of offspring.

Our animal forefathers invented it. Some birds seem to live as reproducing mates in a divorceless monogamy. Among gorillas and orangutans the association of the parents continues to the end of the breeding season, and has many human features. Any approach to loose behavior on the part of the female is severely punished by the male.² The orangs of Borneo, says De Crespigny, “live in families: the male, the female, and a young one”; and Dr. Savage reports of the gorillas that “it is not unusual to see the ‘old folks’ sitting under a tree regaling themselves with fruit and friendly chat, while their children are leaping around them and swinging from branch to branch in boisterous merriment.”³ Marriage is older than man.

Societies without marriage are rare, but the sedulous inquirer can find enough of them to form a respectable transition from the promiscuity of the lower mammals to the marriages of primitive men. In Futuna and Hawaii the majority of the people did not marry at all;⁴ the Lubus mated freely and indiscriminately, and had no conception of marriage; certain tribes of Borneo lived in marriageless association, freer than the birds; and among some peoples of primitive Russia “the men utilized the women without distinction, so that no woman had her appointed husband.” African pygmies have been described as having no marriage institutions, but as following “their animal instincts wholly without restraint.”⁵ This primitive “nationalization of women,” corresponding to primitive communism in land and food, passed away at so early a stage that few traces of it remain. Some memory of it, however, lingered on in divers forms: in the feeling of many nature peoples that monogamy—which they would define as the monopoly of a woman by one man—is unnatural and immoral;⁶ in periodic festivals of license (still surviving faintly in our Mardi Gras), when sexual restraints were temporarily abandoned; in the demand that a woman should give herself—as at the Temple of Mylitta in Babylon—to any man that solicited her, before she would be allowed to marry;* in the custom of wife-lending, so essential to many primitive codes of hospitality; and in the jus primœ noctis, or right of the first night, by which, in early feudal Europe, the lord of the manor, perhaps representing the ancient rights of the tribe, occasionally deflowered the bride before the bridegroom was allowed to consummate the marriage.^6a

A variety of tentative unions gradually took the place of indiscriminate relations. Among the Orang Sakai of Malacca a girl remained for a time with each man of the tribe, passing from one to another until she had made the rounds; then she began again.⁷ Among the Yakuts of Siberia, the Botocudos of South Africa, the lower classes of Tibet, and many other peoples, marriage was quite experimental, and could be ended at the will of either party, with no reasons given or required. Among the Bushmen “any disagreement sufficed to end a union, and new connections could immediately be found for both.” Among the Damaras, according to Sir Francis Galton, “the spouse was changed almost weekly, and I seldom knew without inquiry who the pro tempore husband of each lady was at any particular time.” Among the Baila “women are bandied about from man to man, and of their own accord leave one husband for another. Young women scarcely out of their teens often have had four or five husbands, all still living.”⁸ The original word for marriage, in Hawaii, meant to try.⁹ Among the Tahitians, a century ago, unions were free and dissoluble at will, so long as there were no children; if a child came the parents might destroy it without social reproach, or the couple might rear the child and enter into a more permanent relation; the man pledged his support to the woman in return for the burden of parental care that she now assumed.¹⁰

Marco Polo writes of a Central Asiatic tribe, inhabiting Peyn (now Keriya) in the thirteenth century: “If a married man goes to a distance from home to be absent twenty days, his wife has a right, if she is so inclined, to take another husband; and the men, on the same principle, marry wherever they happen to reside.”¹¹ So old are the latest innovations in marriage and morals.

Letourneau said of marriage that “every possible experiment compatible with the duration of savage or barbarian societies has been tried, or is still practised, amongst various races, without the least thought of the moral ideas generally prevailing in Europe.”¹² In addition to experiments in permanence there were experiments in relationship. In a few cases we find “group marriage,” by which a number of men belonging to one group married collectively a number of women belonging to another group.¹³ In Tibet, for example, it was the custom for a group of brothers to marry a group of sisters, and for the two groups to practise sexual communism between them, each of the men cohabiting with each of the women.¹⁴ Caesar reported a similar custom in ancient Britain.¹⁵ Survivals of it appear in the “levirate,” a custom existing among the early Jews and other ancient peoples, by which a man was obligated to marry his brother’s widow;¹⁶ this was the rule that so irked Onan.

What was it that led men to replace the semi-promiscuity of primitive society with individual marriage? Since, in a great majority of nature peoples, there are few, if any, restraints on premarital relations, it is obvious that physical desire does not give rise to the institution of marriage. For marriage, with its restrictions and psychological irritations, could not possibly compete with sexual communism as a mode of satisfying the erotic propensities of men. Nor could the individual establishment offer at the outset any mode of rearing children that would be obviously superior to their rearing by the mother, her family, and the clan. Some powerful economic motives must have favored the evolution of marriage. In all probability (for again we must remind ourselves how little we really know of origins) these motives were connected with the rising institution of property.

Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have cheap slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men’s children. Polygamy, or the marriage of one person to several mates, appears here and there in the form of polyandry—the marriage of one woman to several men—as among the Todas and some tribes of Tibet;¹⁷ the custom may still be found where males outnumber females considerably.¹⁸ But this custom soon falls prey to the conquering male, and polygamy has come to mean for us, usually, what would more strictly be called polygyny—the possession of several wives by one man. Medieval theologians thought that Mohammed had invented polygamy, but it antedated Islam by some years, being the prevailing mode of marriage in the primitive world.¹⁹ Many causes conspired to make it general. In early society, because of hunting and war, the life of the male is more violent and dangerous, and the death rate of men is higher, than that of women. The consequent excess of women compels a choice between polygamy and the barren celibacy of a minority of women; but such celibacy is intolerable to peoples who require a high birth rate to make up for a high death rate, and who therefore scorn the mateless and childless woman. Again, men like variety; as the Negroes of Angola expressed it, they were “not able to eat always of the same dish.” Also, men like youth in their mates, and women age rapidly in primitive communities. The women themselves often favored polygamy; it permitted them to nurse their children longer, and therefore to reduce the frequency of motherhood without interfering with the erotic and philoprogenitive inclinations of the male. Sometimes the first wife, burdened with toil, helped her husband to secure an additional wife, so that her burden might be shared, and additional children might raise the productive power and the wealth of the family.²⁰ Children were economic assets, and men invested in wives in order to draw children from them like interest. In the patriarchal system wives and children were in effect the slaves of the man; the more a man had of them, the richer he was. The poor man practised monogamy, but he looked upon it as a shameful condition, from which some day he would rise to the respected position of a polygamous male.²¹

Doubtless polygamy was well adapted to the marital needs of a primitive society in which women outnumbered men. It had a eugenic value superior to that of contemporary monogamy; for whereas in modern society the most able and prudent men marry latest and have least children, under polygamy the most able men, presumably, secured the bests mates and had most children. Hence polygamy has survived among practically all nature peoples, even among the majority of civilized mankind; only in our day has it begun to die in the Orient. Certain conditions, however, militated against it. The decrease in danger and violence, consequent upon a settled agricultural life, brought the sexes towards an approximate numerical equality; and under these circumstances open polygamy, even in primitive societies, became the privilege of the prosperous minority.²² The mass of the people practised a monogamy tempered with adultery, while another minority, of willing or regretful celibates, balanced the polygamy of the rich. Jealousy in the male, and possessiveness in the female, entered into the situation more effectively as the sexes approximated in number; for where the strong could not have a multiplicity of wives except by taking the actual or potential wives of other men and by (in some cases) offending their own, polygamy became a difficult matter, which only the cleverest could manage. As property accumulated, and men were loath to scatter it in small bequests, it became desirable to differentiate wives into “chief wife” and concubines, so that only the children of the former should share the legacy; this remained the status of marriage in Asia until our own generation. Gradually the chief wife became the only wife, the concubines became kept women in secret and apart, or they disappeared; and as Christianity entered upon the scene, monogamy, in Europe, took the place of polygamy as the lawful and outward form of sexual association. But monogamy, like letters and the state, is artificial, and belongs to the history, not to the origins, of civilization.

Whatever form the union might take, marriage was obligatory among nearly all primitive peoples. The unmarried male had no standing in the community, or was considered only half a man.²³ Exogamy, too, was compulsory: that is to say, a man was expected to secure his wife from another clan than his own. Whether this custom arose because the primitive mind suspected the evil effects of close inbreeding, or because such intergroup marriages created or cemented useful political alliances, promoted social organization, and lessened the danger of war, or because the capture of a wife from another tribe had become a fashionable mark of male maturity, or because familiarity breeds contempt and distance lends enchantment to the view—we do not know. In any case the restriction was well-nigh universal in early society; and though it was successfully violated by the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies and the Incas, who all favored the marriage of brother and sister, it survived into Roman and modern law and consciously or unconsciously moulds our behavior to this day.

How did the male secure his wife from another tribe? Where the matriarchal organization was strong he was often required to go and live with the clan of the girl whom he sought. As the patriarchal system developed, the suitor was allowed, after a term of service to the father, to take his bride back to his own clan; so Jacob served Laban for Leah and Rachel.²⁴ Sometimes the suitor shortened the matter with plain, blunt force. It was an advantage as well as a distinction to have stolen a wife; not only would she be a cheap slave, but new slaves could be begotten of her, and these children would chain her to her slavery. Such marriage by capture, though not the rule, occurred sporadically in the primitive world. Among the North American Indians the women were included in the spoils of war, and this happened so frequently that in some tribes the husbands and their wives spoke mutually unintelligible languages. The Slavs of Russia and Serbia practised occasional marriage by capture until the last century.*²⁵ Vestiges of it remain in the custom of simulating the capture of the bride by the groom in certain wedding ceremonies.²⁷ All in all it was a logical aspect of the almost incessant war of the tribes, and a logical starting-point for that eternal war of the sexes whose only truces are brief nocturnes and dreamless sleep.

As wealth grew it became more convenient to offer the father a substantial present—or a sum of money—for his daughter, rather than serve for her in an alien clan, or risk the violence and feuds that might come of marriage by capture. Consequently marriage by purchase and parental arrangement was the rule in early societies.²⁸ Transition forms occur; the Melanesians sometimes stole their wives, but made the theft legal by a later payment to her family. Among some natives of New Guinea the man abducted the girl, and then, while he and she were in hiding, commissioned his friends to bargain with her father over a purchase price.²⁹ The ease with which moral indignation in these matters might be financially appeased is illuminating. A Maori mother, wailing loudly, bitterly cursed the youth who had eloped with her daughter, until he presented her with a blanket. “That was all I wanted,” she said; “I only wanted to get a blanket, and therefore made this noise.”³⁰ Usually the bride cost more than a blanket: among the Hottentots her price was an ox or a cow; among the Croo three cows and a sheep; among the Kaffirs six to thirty head of cattle, depending upon the rank of the girl’s family; and among the Togos sixteen dollars cash and six dollars in goods.³¹

Marriage by purchase prevails throughout primitive Africa, and is still a normal institution in China and Japan; it flourished in ancient India and Judea, and in pre-Columbian Central America and Peru; instances of it occur in Europe today.³² It is a natural development of patriarchal institutions; the father owns the daughter, and may dispose of her, within broad limits, as he sees fit. The Orinoco Indians expressed the matter by saying that the suitor should pay the father for rearing the girl for his use.³³ Sometimes the girl was exhibited to potential suitors in a bride-show; so among the Somalis the bride, richly caparisoned, was led about on horseback or on foot, in an atmosphere heavily perfumed to stir the suitors to a handsome price.³⁴ There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase; on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them, and scorned the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price;³⁵ they believed that in a “love-match” the villainous male was getting too much for nothing.³⁶ On the other hand, it was usual for the father to acknowledge the bridegroom’s payment with a return gift which, as time went on, approximated more and more in value to the sum offered for the bride.³⁷ Rich fathers, anxious to smooth the way for their daughters, gradually enlarged these gifts until the institution of the dowry took form; and the purchase of the husband by the father replaced, or accompanied, the purchase of the wife by the suitor.³⁸

In all these forms and varieties of marriage there is hardly a trace of romantic love. We find a few cases of love-marriages among the Papuans of New Guinea; among other primitive peoples we come upon instances of love (in the sense of mutual devotion rather than mutual need), but usually these attachments have nothing to do with marriage. In simple days men married for cheap labor, profitable parentage, and regular meals. “In Yariba,” says Lander, “marriage is celebrated by the natives as unconcernedly as possible; a man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn—affection is altogether out of the question.”³⁹ Since premarital relations are abundant in primitive society, passion is not dammed up by denial, and seldom affects the choice of a wife. For the same reason—the absence of delay between desire and fulfilment—no time is given for that brooding introversion of frustrated, and therefore idealizing, passion which is usually the source of youthful romantic love. Such love is reserved for developed civilizations, in which morals have raised barriers against desire, and the growth of wealth has enabled some men to afford, and some women to provide, the luxuries and delicacies of romance; primitive peoples are too poor to be romantic. One rarely finds love poetry in their songs. When the missionaries translated the Bible into the language of the Algonquins they could discover no native equivalent for the word love. The Hottentots are described as “cold and indifferent to one another” in marriage. On the Gold Coast “not even the appearance of affection exists between husband and wife”; and it is the same in primitive Australia. “I asked Baba,” said Caillié, speaking of a Senegal Negro, “why he did not sometimes make merry with his wives. He replied that if he did he should not be able to manage them.” An Australian native, asked why he wished to marry, answered honestly that he wanted a wife to secure food, water and wood for him, and to carry his belongings on the march.⁴⁰ The kiss, which seems so indispensable to America, is quite unknown to primitive peoples, or known only to be scorned.⁴¹

In general the “savage” takes his sex philosophically, with hardly more of metaphysical or theological misgiving than the animal; he does not brood over it, or fly into a passion with it; it is as much a matter of course with him as his food. He makes no pretense to idealistic motives. Marriage is never a sacrament with him, and seldom an affair of lavish ceremony; it is frankly a commercial transaction. It never occurs to him to be ashamed that he subordinates emotional to practical considerations in choosing his mate; he would rather be ashamed of the opposite, and would demand of us, if he were as immodest as we are, some explanation of our custom of binding a man and a woman together almost for life because sexual desire has chained them for a moment with its lightning. The primitive male looked upon marriage in terms not of sexual license but of economic cooperation. He expected the woman—and the woman expected herself—to be not so much gracious and beautiful (though he appreciated these qualities in her) as useful and industrious; she was to be an economic asset rather than a total loss; otherwise the matter-of-fact “savage” would never have thought of marriage at all. Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a private debauch; it was a way whereby a man and a woman, working together, might be more prosperous than if each worked alone. Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.

II. SEXUAL MORALITY

Premarital relations—Prostitution—Chastity—Virginity—The double standard—Modesty—The relativity of morals—The biological rôle of modesty—Adultery—Divorce—Abortion—Infanticide—Childhood—The individual

The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; for the reproductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its persistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions. The first problem concerns premarital relations—shall they be restricted, or free? Even among animals sex is not quite unrestrained; the rejection of the male by the female except in periods of rut reduces sex to a much more modest rôle in the animal world than it occupies in our own lecherous species. As Beaumarchais put it, man differs from the animal in eating without being hungry, drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons. Among primitive peoples we find some analogue, or converse, of animal restrictions, in the tabu placed upon relations with a woman in her menstrual period. With this general exception premarital intercourse is left for the most part free in the simplest societies. Among the North American Indians the young men and women mated freely; and these relations were not held an impediment to marriage. Among the Papuans of New Guinea sex life began at an extremely early age, and premarital promiscuity was the rule.⁴³ Similar premarital liberty obtained among the Soyots of Siberia, the Igorots of the Philippines, the natives of Upper Burma, the Kaffirs and Bushmen of Africa, the tribes of the Niger and the Uganda, of New Georgia, the Murray Islands, the Andaman Islands, Tahiti, Polynesia, Assam, etc.⁴⁴

Under such conditions we must not expect to find much prostitution in primitive society. The “oldest profession” is comparatively young; it arises only with civilization, with the appearance of property and the disappearance of premarital freedom. Here and there we find girls selling themselves for a while to raise a dowry, or to provide funds for the temples; but this occurs only where the local moral code approves of it as a pious sacrifice to help thrifty parents or hungry gods.⁴⁵

Chastity is a correspondingly late development. What the primitive maiden dreaded was not the loss of virginity, but a reputation for sterility;⁴⁶ premarital pregnancy was, more often than not, an aid rather than a handicap in finding a husband, for it settled all doubts of sterility, and promised profitable children. The simpler tribes, before the coming of property, seem to have held virginity in contempt, as indicating unpopularity. The Kamchadal bridegroom who found his bride to be a virgin was much put out, and “roundly abused her mother for the negligent way in which she had brought up her daughter.”⁴⁷ In many places virginity was considered a barrier to marriage, because it laid upon the husband the unpleasant task of violating the tabu that forbade him to shed the blood of any member of his tribe. Sometimes girls offered themselves to a stranger in order to break this tabu against their marriage. In Tibet mothers anxiously sought men who would deflower their daughters; in Malabar the girls themselves begged the services of passers-by to the same end, “for while they were virgins they could not find a husband.” In some tribes the bride was obliged to give herself to the wedding guests before going in to her husband; in others the bridegroom hired a man to end the virginity of his bride; among certain Philippine tribes a special official was appointed, at a high salary, to perform this function for prospective husbands.⁴⁸

What was it that changed virginity from a fault into a virtue, and made it an element in the moral codes of all the higher civilizations? Doubtless it was the institution of property. Premarital chastity came as an extension, to the daughters, of the proprietary feeling with which the patriarchal male looked upon his wife. The valuation of virginity rose when, under marriage by purchase, the virgin bride was found to bring a higher price than her weak sister; the virgin gave promise, by her past, of that marital fidelity which now seemed so precious to men beset by worry lest they should leave their property to surreptitious children.⁴⁹

The men never thought of applying the same restrictions to themselves; no society in history has ever insisted on the premarital chastity of the male; no language has ever had a word for a virgin man.⁵⁰ The aura of virginity was kept exclusively for daughters, and pressed upon them in a thousands ways. The Tuaregs punished the irregularity of a daughter or a sister with death; the Negroes of Nubia, Abyssinia, Somaliland, etc., practised upon their daughters the cruel art of infibulation—i.e., the attachment of a ring or lock to the genitals to prevent copulation; in Burma and Siam a similar practice survived to our own day.⁵¹ Forms of seclusion arose by which girls were kept from providing or receiving temptation. In New Britain the richer parents confined their daughters, through five dangerous years, in huts guarded by virtuous old crones; the girls were never allowed to come out, and only their relatives could see them. Some tribes in Borneo kept their unmarried girls in solitary confinement.⁵² From these primitive customs to the purdah of the Moslems and the Hindus is but a step, and indicates again how nearly “civilization” touches “savagery.”

Modesty came with virginity and the patriarchate. There are many tribes which to this day show no shame in exposing the body;^52a indeed, some are ashamed to wear clothing. All Africa rocked with laughter when Livingstone begged his black hosts to put on some clothing before the arrival of his wife. The Queen of the Balonda was quite naked when she held court for Livingstone.⁵³ A small minority of tribes practise sex relations publicly, without any thought of shame.⁵⁴ At first modesty is the feeling of the woman that she is tabu in her periods. When marriage by purchase takes form, and virginity in the daughter brings a profit to her father, seclusion and the compulsion to virginity beget in the girl a sense of obligation to chastity. Again, modesty is the feeling of the wife who, under purchase marriage, feels a financial obligation to her husband to refrain from such external sexual relations as cannot bring him any recompense. Clothing appears at this point, if motives of adornment and protection have not already engendered it; in many tribes women wore clothing only after marriage,⁵⁵ as a sign of their exclusive possession by a husband, and as a deterrent to gallantry; primitive man did not agree with the author of Penguin Isle that clothing encouraged lechery. Chastity, however, bears no necessary relation to clothing; some travelers report that morals in Africa vary inversely as the amount of dress.⁵⁶ It is clear that what men are ashamed of depends entirely upon the local tabus and customs of their group. Until recently a Chinese woman was ashamed to show her foot, an Arab woman her face, a Tuareg woman her mouth; but the women of ancient Egypt, of nineteenth-century India and of twentieth-century Bali (before prurient tourists came) never thought of shame at the exposure of their breasts.

We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. It is substantially true that—as Anatole France ironically expressed the matter—“morality is the sum of the prejudices of a community”;⁵⁷ and that, as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain. But this does not prove the worthlessness of morals; it only shows in what varied ways social order has been preserved. Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which the members of a society practise its moral code is quite as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to understand that there may be more wisdom in the moral code of the group—the formulated experience of generations of the race—than can be explained in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us that even that which we cannot understand may be true. The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. We are warranted in concluding that morals are relative, and indispensable.

Since old and basic customs represent a natural selection of group ways after centuries of trial and error, we must expect to find some social utility, or survival value, in virginity and modesty, despite their historical relativity, their association with marriage by purchase, and their contributions to neurosis. Modesty was a strategic retreat which enabled the girl, where she had any choice, to select her mate more deliberately, or compel him to show finer qualities before winning her; and the very obstructions it raised against desire generated those sentiments of romantic love which heightened her value in his eyes. The inculcation of virginity destroyed the naturalness and ease of primitive sexual life; but, by discouraging early sex development and premature motherhood, it lessened the gap—which tends to widen disruptively as civilization develops—between economic and sexual maturity. Probably it served in this way to strengthen the individual physically and mentally, to lengthen adolescence and training, and so to lift the level of the race.

As the institution of property developed, adultery graduated from a venial into a mortal sin. Half of the primitive peoples known to us attach no great importance to it.⁵⁸ The rise of property not only led to the exaction of complete fidelity from the woman, but generated in the male a proprietary attitude towards her; even when he lent her to a guest it was because she belonged to him in body and soul. Suttee was the completion of this conception; the woman must go down into the master’s grave along with his other belongings. Under the patriarchate adultery was classed with theft;⁵⁹ it was, so to speak, an infringement of patent. Punishment for it varied through all degrees of severity from the indifference of the simpler tribes to the disembowelment of adulteresses among certain California Indians.⁶⁰ After centuries of punishment the new virtue of wifely fidelity was firmly established, and had generated an appropriate conscience in the feminine heart. Many Indian tribes surprised their conquerors by the unapproachable virtue of their squaws; and certain male travelers have hoped that the women of Europe and America might some day equal in marital faithfulness the wives of the Zulus and the Papuans.⁶¹

It was easier for the Papuans, since among them, as among most primitive peoples, there were few impediments to the divorce of the woman by the man. Unions seldom lasted more than a few years among the American Indians. “A large proportion of the old and middle-aged men,” says Schoolcraft, “have had many different wives, and their children, scattered around the country, are unknown to them.”⁶² They “laugh at Europeans for having only one wife, and that for life; they consider that the Good Spirit formed them to be happy, and not to continue together unless their tempers and dispositions were congenial.”⁶³ The Cherokees changed wives three or four times a year; the conservative Samoans kept them as long as three years.⁶⁴ With the coming of a settled agricultural life, unions became more permanent. Under the patriarchal system the man found it uneconomical to divorce a wife, for this meant, in effect, to lose a profitable slave.⁶⁵ As the family became the productive unit of society, tilling the soil together, it prospered—other things equal—according to its size and cohesion; it was found to some advantage that the union of the mates should continue until the last child was reared. By that time no energy remained for a new romance, and the lives of the parents had been forged into one by common work and trials. Only with the passage to urban industry, and the consequent reduction of the family in size and economic importance, has divorce become widespread again.

In general, throughout history, men have wanted many children, and therefore have called motherhood sacred; while women, who know more about reproduction, have secretly rebelled against this heavy assignment, and have used an endless variety of means to reduce the burdens of maternity. Primitive men do not usually care to restrict population; under normal conditions children are profitable, and the male regrets only that they cannot all be sons. It is the woman who invents abortion, infanticide and contraception—for even the last occurs, sporadically, among primitive peoples.⁶⁶ It is astonishing to find how similar are the motives of the “savage” to the “civilized” woman in preventing birth: to escape the burden of rearing offspring, to preserve a youthful figure, to avert the disgrace of extramarital motherhood, to avoid death, etc. The simplest means of reducing maternity was the refusal of the man by the woman during the period of nursing, which might be prolonged for many years. Sometimes, as among the Cheyenne Indians, the women developed the custom of refusing to bear a second child until the first was ten years old. In New Britain the women had no children till two or four years after marriage. The Guaycurus of Brazil were constantly diminishing because the women would bear no children till the age of thirty. Among the Papuans abortion was frequent; “children are burdensome,” said the women; “we are weary of them; we go dead.” Some Maori tribes used herbs or induced artificial malposition of the uterus, to prevent conception⁶⁷

When abortion failed, infanticide remained. Most nature peoples permitted the killing of the newborn child if it was deformed, or diseased, or a bastard, or if its mother had died in giving it birth. As if any reason would be good in the task of limiting population to the available means of subsistence, many tribes killed infants whom they considered to have been born under unlucky circumstances: so the Bondei natives strangled all children who entered the world headfirst; the Kamchadals killed babes born in stormy weather; Madagascar tribes exposed, drowned, or buried alive children who made their début in March or April, or on a Wednesday or a Friday, or in the last week of the month. If a woman gave birth to twins it was, in some tribes, held proof of adultery, since no man could be the father of two children at the same time; and therefore one or both of the children suffered death. The practice of infanticide was particularly prevalent among nomads, who found children a problem on their long marches. The Bangerang tribe of Victoria killed half their children at birth; the Lenguas of the Paraguayan Chaco allowed only one child per family per seven years to survive; the Abipones achieved a French economy in population by rearing a boy and a girl in each household, killing off other offspring as fast as they appeared. Where famine conditions existed or threatened, most tribes strangled the newborn, and some tribes ate them. Usually it was the girl that was most subject to infanticide; occasionally she was tortured to death with a view to inducing the soul to appear, in its next incarnation, in the form of a boy.⁶⁸ Infanticide was practised without cruelty and without remorse; for in the first moments after delivery, apparently, the mother felt no instinctive love for the child.

Once the child had been permitted to live a few days, it was safe against infanticide; soon parental love was evoked by its helpless simplicity, and in most cases it was treated more affectionately by its primitive parents than the average child of the higher races.⁶⁹ For lack of milk or soft food the mother nursed the child from two to four years, sometimes for twelve;⁷⁰ one traveler describes a boy who had learned to smoke before he was weaned;⁷¹ and often a youngster running about with other children would interrupt his play—or his work—to go and be nursed by his

mother.⁷² The Negro mother at work carried her infant on her back, and sometimes fed it by slinging her breasts over her shoulder.⁷³ Primitive discipline was indulgent but not ruinous; at an early age the child was left to face for itself the consequences of its stupidity, its insolence, or its pugnacity; and learning went on apace. Filial, as well as parental, love was highly developed in natural society.⁷⁴

Dangers and disease were frequent in primitive childhood, and mortality was high. Youth was brief, for at an early age marital and martial responsibility began, and soon the individual was lost in the heavy tasks of replenishing and defending the group. The women were consumed in caring for children, the men in providing for them. When the youngest child had been reared the parents were worn out; as little space remained for individual life at the end as at the beginning. Individualism, like liberty, is a luxury of civilization. Only with the dawn of history were a sufficient number of men and women freed from the burdens of hunger, reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture and art.

III. SOCIAL MORALITY

The nature of virtue and vice—Greed—Dishonesty—Violence—Homicide—Suicide—The socialization of the individual—Altruism—Hospitality—Manners—Tribal limits of morality—Primitive vs. modern morals—Religion and morals

Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code. For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon it day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race. Biologically it is badly equipped for civilization, since its instincts provide only for traditional and basic situations, and include impulses more adapted to the jungle than to the town. Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced form of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged—or slowly changing—impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circumstances of social life.

Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal gorges himself because he does not know when he may find food again; this uncertainty is the origin of greed. The Yakuts have been known to eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic, are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia.⁷⁵ Economic security is too recent an achievement of civilization to have eliminated this natural greed; it still appears in the insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful modern man or woman stores up gold, or other goods, that may in emergency be turned into food. Greed for drink is not as widespread as greed for food, for most human aggregations have centered around some water supply. Nevertheless, the drinking of intoxicants is almost universal; not so much because men are greedy as because they are cold and wish to be warmed, or unhappy and wish to forget—or simply because the water available to them is not fit to drink.

Dishonesty is not so ancient as greed, for hunger is older than property. The simplest “savages” seem to be the most honest.⁷⁶ “Their word is sacred,” said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know “nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.”⁷⁷ As international communications improved, this naïve honesty disappeared; Europe has taught the gentle art to the Hottentots. In general, dishonesty rises with civilization, because under civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are more things to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When property develops among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train.⁷⁸

Crimes of violence are as old as greed; the struggle for food, land and mates has in every generation fed the earth with blood, and has offered a dark background for the fitful light of civilization. Primitive man was cruel because he had to be; life taught him that he must have an arm always ready to strike, and a heart apt for “natural killing.” The blackest page in anthropology is the story of primitive torture, and of the joy that many primitive men and women seem to have taken in the infliction of pain.⁷⁹ Much of this cruelty was associated with war; within the tribe manners were less ferocious, and primitive men treated one another—and even their slaves—with a quite civilized kindliness.⁸⁰ But since men had to kill vigorously in war, they learned to kill also in time of peace; for to many a primitive mind no argument is settled until one of the disputants is dead. Among many tribes murder, even of another member of the same clan, aroused far less horror than it used to do with us. The Fuegians punished a murderer merely by exiling him until his fellows had forgotten his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer unclean, and required that he should blacken his face with charcoal; but after a while, if he washed himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed himself brown, he was received into society again. The savages of Futuna, like our own, looked upon a murderer as a hero.⁸¹ In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed some one, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of headhunting, which survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought back most heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in his village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him they might become the mothers of brave and potent men.*⁸²

Where food is dear life is cheap. Eskimo sons must kill their parents when these have become so old as to be helpless and useless; failure to kill them in such cases would be considered a breach of filial duty.⁸³ Even his own life seems cheap to primitive man, for he kills himself with a readiness rivaled only by the Japanese. If an offended person commits suicide, or mutilates himself, the offender must imitate him or become a pariah;⁸⁴ so old is hara-kiri. Any reason may suffice for suicide: some Indian women of North America killed themselves because their men had assumed the privilege of scolding them; and a young Trobriand Islander committed suicide because his wife had smoked all his tobacco.⁸⁵

To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization. It was a great advance when the strong consented to eat the weak by due process of law. No society can survive if it allows its members to behave toward one another in the same way in which it encourages them to behave as a group toward other groups; internal cooperation is the first law of external competition. The struggle for existence is not ended by mutual aid, it is incorporated, or transferred to the group. Other things equal, the ability to compete with rival groups will be proportionate to the ability of the individual members and families to combine with one another. Hence every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the heart of the individual, as its secret allies and aides, social dispositions that mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages—by calling them virtues—those qualities or habits in the individual which redound to the advantage of the group, and discourages contrary qualities by calling them vices. In this way the individual is in some outward measure socialized, and the animal becomes a citizen.

It was hardly more difficult to generate social sentiments in the soul of the “savage” than it is to raise them now in the heart of modern man. The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property intensifies individualism. Primitive man was perhaps readier than contemporary man to cooperate with his fellows; social solidarity came more easily to him since he had more perils and interests in common with his group, and less possessions to separate him from the rest.⁸⁶ The natural man was violent and greedy; but he was also kindly and generous, ready to share even with strangers, and to make presents to his guests.⁸⁷ Every schoolboy knows that primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to the extent of offering to the traveler the wife or daughter of the host.⁸⁸ To decline such an offer was a serious offense, not only to the host but to the woman; these are among the perils faced by missionaries. Often the later treatment of the guest was determined by the manner in which he had acquitted himself of these responsibilities.⁸⁹ Uncivilized man appears to have felt proprietary, but not sexual, jealousy; it did not disturb him that his wife had “known” men before marrying him, or now slept with his guest; but as her owner, rather than her lover, he would have been incensed to find her cohabiting with another man without his consent. Some African husbands lent their wives to strangers for a consideration.⁹⁰

The rules of courtesy were as complex in most simple peoples as in advanced nations.⁹¹ Each group had formal modes of salutation and farewell. Two individuals, on meeting, rubbed noses, or smelled each other, or gently bit each other;⁹² as we have seen, they never kissed. Some crude tribes were more polite than the modern average; the Dyak head-hunters, we are told, were “gentle and peaceful” in their home life, and the Indians of Central America considered the loud talking and brusque behavior of the white man as signs of poor breeding and a primitive culture.⁹³

Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to themselves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the chosen people, specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting example for mankind. One Indian tribe called itself “The Only Men”; another called itself “Men of Men”; the Caribs said, “We alone are people.” The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues.⁹⁴ Consequently it seldom occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes the moral restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he frankly conceived it to be the function of morals to give strength and coherence to his group against other groups. Commandments and tabus applied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they were his guests, he might go as far as he dared.⁹⁵

Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied. The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times, extended—though with decreasing intensity—to a greater number of people than before.* As tribes were gathered up into those larger units called states, morality overflowed its tribal bounds; and as communication—or a common danger—united and assimilated states, morals seeped through frontiers, and some men began to apply their commandments to all Europeans, to all whites, at last to all men. Perhaps there have always been idealists who wished to love all men as their neighbors, and perhaps in every generation they have been futile voices crying in a wilderness of nationalism and war. But probably the number—even the relative number—of such men has increased. There are no morals in diplomacy, and la politique n’a pas d’entrailles; but there are morals in international trade, merely because such trade cannot go on without some degree of restraint, regulation, and confidence. Trade began in piracy; it culminates in morality.

Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate his personal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not invented but made use of, religion. The ancient geographer Strabo expressed the most advanced views on this subject nineteen hundred years ago:

Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mystery and supernaturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. But was this moral utility the source or origin of religion?

IV. RELIGION

Primitive atheists

If we define religion as the worship of supernatural forces, we must observe at the outset that some peoples have apparently no religion at all. Certain Pygmy tribes of Africa had no observable cult or rites; they had no totem, no fetishes, and no gods; they buried their dead without ceremony, and seem to have paid no further attention to them; they lacked even superstitions, if we may believe otherwise incredible travelers.^96a The dwarfs of the Cameroon recognized only malevolent deities, and did nothing to placate them, on the ground that it was useless to try. The Veddahs of Ceylon went no further than to admit the possibility of gods and immortal souls; but they offered no prayers or sacrifices. Asked about God they answered, as puzzled as the latest philosopher: “Is he on a rock? On a white-ant hill? On a tree? I never saw a god!”^96b The North American Indians conceived a god, but did not worship him; like Epicurus they thought him too remote to be concerned in their affairs.^96c An Abipone Indian rebuffed a metaphysical inquirer in a manner quite Confucian: “Our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the plain afford grass and water for their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in the heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars.” The Eskimos, when asked who had made the heavens and the earth, always replied, “We do not know.”^96d A Zulu was asked: “When you see the sun rising and setting, and the trees growing, do you know who made them and governs them?” He answered, simply: “No, we see them, but cannot tell how they came; we suppose that they came by themselves.”^96e

Such cases are exceptional, and the old belief that religion is universal is substantially correct. To the philosopher this is one of the outstanding facts of history and psychology; he is not content to know that all religions contain much nonsense, but rather he is fascinated by the problem of the antiquity and persistence of belief. What are the sources of the indestructible piety of mankind?

1. The Sources of Religion

Fear—Wonder—Dreams—The soul—Animism

Fear, as Lucretius said, was the first mother of the gods. Fear, above all, of death. Primitive life was beset with a thousand dangers, and seldom ended with natural decay; long before old age could come, violence or some strange disease carried off the great majority of men. Hence early man did not believe that death was ever natural;⁹⁷ he attributed it to the operation of supernatural agencies. In the mythology of the natives of New Britain death came to men by an error of the gods. The good god Kambinana told his foolish brother Korvouva, “Go down to men and tell them to cast their skins; so shall they avoid death. But tell the serpents that they must henceforth die.” Korvouva mixed the messages; he delivered the secret of immortality to the snakes, and the doom of death to men.⁹⁸ Many tribes thought that death was due to the shrinkage of the skin, and that man would be immortal if only he could moult.⁹⁹

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, coöperated to generate religious belief. Wonder and mystery adhered particularly to sex and dreams, and the mysterious influence of heavenly bodies upon the earth and man. Primitive man marveled at the phantoms that he saw in sleep, and was struck with terror when he beheld, in his dreams, the figures of those whom he knew to be dead. He buried his dead in the earth to prevent their return; he buried victuals and goods with the corpse lest it should come back to curse him; sometimes he left to the dead the house in which death had come, while he himself moved on to another shelter; in some places he carried the body out of the house not through a door but through a hole in the wall, and bore it rapidly three times around the dwelling, so that the spirit might forget the entrance and never haunt the home.¹⁰⁰

Such experiences convinced early man that every living thing had a soul, or secret life, within it, which could be separated from the body in illness, sleep or death. “Let no one wake a man brusquely,” said one of the Upanishads of ancient India, “for it is a matter difficult of cure if the soul find not its way back to him.”¹⁰¹ Not man alone but all things had souls; the external world was not insensitive or dead, it was intensely alive;¹⁰² if this were not so, thought primitive philosophy, nature would be full of inexplicable occurrences, like the motion of the sun, or the death-dealing lightning, or the whispering of the trees. The personal way of conceiving objects and events preceded the impersonal or abstract; religion preceded philosophy. Such animism is the poetry of religion, and the religion of poetry. We may see it at its lowest in the wonder-struck eyes of a dog that watches a paper blown before him by the wind, and perhaps believes that a spirit moves the paper from within; and we find the same feeling at its highest in the language of the poet. To the primitive mind—and to the poet in all ages—mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon and sky are sacramentally holy things, because they are the outward and visible signs of inward and invisible souls. To the early Greeks the sky was the god Ouranos, the moon was Selene, the earth was Gaea, the sea was Poseidon, and everywhere in the woods was Pan. To the ancient Germans the forest primeval was peopled with genii, elves, trolls, giants, dwarfs and fairies; these sylvan creatures survive in the music of Wagner and the poetic dramas of Ibsen. The simpler peasants of Ireland still believe in fairies, and no poet or playwright can belong to the Irish literary revival unless he employs them. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism; it is good and nourishing to treat all things as alive. To the sensitive spirit, says the most sensitive of contemporary writers,

2. The Objects of Religion

The sun—The stars—The earth—Sex—Animals—Totemism—The transition to human gods—Ghost-worship—Ancestor-worship

Since all things have souls, or contain hidden gods, the objects of religious worship are numberless. They fall into six classes: celestial, terrestrial, sexual, animal, human, and divine. Of course we shall never know which of our universe of objects was worshiped first. One of the first was probably the moon. Just as our own folk-lore speaks of the “man in the moon,” so primitive legend conceived the moon as a bold male who caused women to menstruate by seducing them. He was a favorite god with women, who worshiped him as their protecting deity. The pale orb was also the measure of time; it was believed to control the weather, and to make both rain and snow; even the frogs prayed to it for rain.¹⁰⁴

We do not know when the sun replaced the moon as the lord of the sky in primitive religion. Perhaps it was when vegetation replaced hunting, and the transit of the sun determined the seasons of sowing and reaping, and its heat was recognized as the main cause of the bounty of the soil. Then the earth became a goddess fertilized by the hot rays, and men worshiped the great orb as the father of all things living.¹⁰⁵ From this simple beginning sun-worship passed down into the pagan faiths of antiquity, and many a later god was only a personification of the sun. Anaxagoras was exiled by the learned Greeks because he ventured the guess that the sun was not a god, but merely a ball of fire, about the size of the Peloponnesus. The Middle Ages kept a relic of sun-worship in the halo pictured around the heads of saints,¹⁰⁶ and in our own day the Emperor of Japan is regarded by most of his people as an incarnation of the sungod.¹⁰⁷ There is hardly any superstition so old but it can be found flourishing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious labor and luxury of a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium to millennium.

Like the sun and the moon, every star contained or was a god, and moved at the command of its indwelling spirit. Under Christianity these spirits became guiding angels, star-pilots, so to speak; and Kepler was not too scientific to believe in them. The sky itself was a great god, worshiped devotedly as giver and withholder of rain. Among many primitive peoples the word for god meant sky; among the Lubari and the Dinkas it meant rain. Among the Mongols the supreme god was Tengri—the sky; in China it was Ti—the sky; in Vedic India it was Dyaus pitar—the “father sky”; among the Greeks it was Zeus—the sky, the “cloud-compeller”; among the Persians it was Ahura—the “azure sky”;¹⁰⁸ and among ourselves men still ask “Heaven” to protect them. The central point in most primitive mythology is the fertile mating of earth and sky.

For the earth, too, was a god, and every main aspect of it was presided over by some deity. Trees had souls quite as much as men, and it was plain murder to cut them down; the North American Indians sometimes attributed their defeat and decay to the fact that the whites had leveled the trees whose spirits had protected the Red Men. In the Molucca Islands blossoming trees were treated as pregnant; no noise, fire, or other disturbance was permitted to mar their peace; else, like a frightened woman, they might drop their fruit before time. In Amboyna no loud sounds were allowed near the rice in bloom lest it should abort into straw.¹⁰⁹ The ancient Gauls worshiped the trees of certain sacred forests; and the Druid priests of England reverenced as holy that mistletoe of the oak which still suggests a pleasant ritual. The veneration of trees, springs, rivers and mountains is the oldest traceable religion of Asia.¹¹⁰ Many mountains were holy places, homes of thundering gods. Earthquakes were the shoulder-shrugging of irked or irate deities: the Fijians ascribed such agitations to the earth-god’s turning over in his sleep; and the Samoans, when the soil trembled, gnawed the ground and prayed to the god Mafuie to stop, lest he should shake the planet to pieces.¹¹¹ Almost everywhere the earth was the Great Mother; our language, which is often the precipitate of primitive or unconscious beliefs, suggests to this day a kinship between matter (materia) and mother (mater).¹¹² Ishtar and Cybele, Demeter and Ceres, Aphrodite and Venus and Freya—these are comparatively late forms of the ancient goddesses of the earth, whose fertility constituted the bounty of the fields; their birth and marriage, their death and triumphant resurrection were conceived as the symbols or causes of the sprouting, the decay, and the vernal renewal of all vegetation. These deities reveal by their gender the primitive association of agriculture with woman. When agriculture became the dominant mode of human life, the vegetation goddesses reigned supreme. Most early gods were of the gentler sex; they were superseded by male deities presumably as a heavenly reflex of the victorious patriarchal family.¹¹³

Just as the profound poetry of the primitive mind sees a secret divinity in the growth of a tree, so it sees a supernatural agency in the conception or birth of a child. The “savage” does not know anything about the ovum or the sperm; he sees only the external structures involved, and deifies them; they, too, have spirits in them, and must be worshiped, for are not these mysteriously creative powers the most marvelous of all? In them, even more than in the soil, the miracle of fertility and growth appears; therefore they must be the most direct embodiments of the divine potency. Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most completely; we shall find such worship in Egypt and India, Babylonia and Assyria, Greece and Rome. The sexual character and functions of primitive deities were held in high regard,¹¹⁴ not through any obscenity of mind, but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possessing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction. The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain proverbial connection between mental innocence and bliss.*

There is hardly an animal in nature, from the Egyptian scarab to the Hindu elephant, that has not somewhere been worshiped as a god. The Ojibwa Indians gave the name of totem to their special sacred animal, to the clan that worshiped it, and to any member of the clan; and this confused word has stumbled into anthropology as totemism, denoting vaguely any worship of a particular object—usually an animal or a plant—as especially sacred to a group. Varieties of totemism have been found scattered over apparently unconnected regions of the earth, from the Indian tribes of North America to the natives of Africa, the Dravidians of India, and the tribes of Australia.¹¹⁵ The totem as a religious object helped to unify the tribe, whose members thought themselves bound up with it or descended from it; the Iroquois, in semi-Darwinian fashion, believed that they were sprung from the primeval mating of women with bears, wolves and deer. The totem—as object or as symbol—became a useful sign of relationship and distinction for primitive peoples, and lapsed, in the course of secularization, into a mascot or emblem, like the lion or eagle of nations, the elk or moose of our fraternal orders, and those dumb animals that are used to represent the elephantine immobility and mulish obstreperousness of our political parties. The dove, the fish and the lamb, in the symbolism of nascent Christianity, were relics of totemic adoration; even the lowly pig was once a totem of prehistoric Jews.¹¹⁶ In most cases the totem animal was tabu—i.e., forbidden, not to be touched; under certain circumstances it might be eaten, but only as a religious act, amounting to the ritual eating of the god.* The Gallas of Abyssinia ate in solemn ceremony the fish that they worshiped, and said, “We feel the spirit moving within us as we eat.” The good missionaries who preached the Gospel to the Gallas were shocked to find among these simple folk a ritual so strangely similar to the central ceremony of the Mass.¹¹⁹

Probably fear was the origin of totemism, as of so many cults; men prayed to animals because the animals were powerful, and had to be appeased. As hunting cleared the woods of the beasts, and gave way to the comparative security of agricultural life, the worship of animals declined, though it never quite disappeared; and the ferocity of the first human gods was probably carried over from the animal deities whom they replaced. The transition is visible in those famous stories of metamorphoses, or changes of form, that are found in the Ovids of all languages, and tell how gods had been, or had become, animals. Later the animal qualities adhered to them obstinately, as the odor of the stable might loyally attend some rural Casanova; even in the complex mind of Homer glaucopis Athene had the eyes of an owl, and Here boöpis had the eyes of a cow. Egyptian and Babylonian gods or ogres with the face of a human being and the body of a beast reveal the same transition and make the same confession—that many human gods were once animal deities.¹²⁰

Most human gods, however, seem to have been, in the beginning, merely idealized dead men. The appearance of the dead in dreams was enough to establish the worship of the dead, for worship, if not the child, is at least the brother, of fear. Men who had been powerful during life, and therefore had been feared, were especially likely to be worshiped after their death.¹²¹ Among several primitive peoples the word for god actually meant “a dead man”; even today the English word spirit and the German word Geist mean both ghost and soul. The Greeks invoked their dead precisely as the Christians were to invoke the saints.¹²² So strong was the belief—first generated in dreams—in the continued life of the dead, that primitive men sometimes sent messages to them in the most literal way; in one tribe the chief, to convey such a letter, recited it verbally to a slave, and then cut off his head for special delivery; if the chief forgot something he sent another decapitated slave as a postscript.¹²³

Gradually the cult of the ghost became the worship of ancestors. All the dead were feared, and had to be propitiated, lest they should curse and blight the lives of the living. This ancestor-worship was so well adapted to promote social authority and continuity, conservatism and order, that it soon spread to every region of the earth. It flourished in Egypt, Greece and Rome, and survives vigorously in China and Japan today; many peoples worship ancestors but no god.¹²⁴* The institution held the family powerfully together despite the hostility of successive generations, and provided an invisible structure for many early societies. And just as compulsion grew into conscience, so fear graduated into love; the ritual of ancestor-worship, probably generated by terror, later aroused the sentiment of awe, and finally developed piety and devotion. It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal as the growing security, peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers pacify and transform the features of their once ferocious deities. The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.

The idea of a human god was a late step in a long development; it was slowly differentiated, through many stages, out of the conception of an ocean or multitude of spirits and ghosts surrounding and inhabiting everything. From the fear and worship of vague and formless spirits men seem to have passed to adoration of celestial, vegetative and sexual powers, then to reverence for animals, and worship of ancestors. The notion of God as Father was probably derived from ancestor-worship; it meant originally that men had been physically begotten by the gods.¹²⁵ In primitive theology there is no sharp or generic distinction between gods and men; to the early Greeks, for example, their gods were ancestors, and their ancestors were gods. A further development came when, out of the medley of ancestors, certain men and women who had been especially distinguished were singled out for clearer deification; so the greater kings became gods, sometimes even before their death. But with this development we reach the historic civilizations.

3. The Methods of Religion

Magic—Vegetation rites—Festivals of license—Myths of the resurrected god—Magic and superstition—Magic and science—Priests

Having conceived a world of spirits, whose nature and intent were unknown to him, primitive man sought, to propitiate them and to enlist them in his aid. Hence to animism, which is the essence of primitive religion, was added magic, which is the soul of primitive ritual. The Polynesians recognized a very ocean of magic power, which they called mana; the magician, they thought, merely tapped this infinite supply of miraculous capacity. The methods by which the spirits, and later the gods, were suborned to human purposes were for the most part “sympathetic magic”—a desired action was suggested to the deities by a partial or imitative performance of the action by men. To make rain fall some primitive magicians poured water out upon the ground, preferably from a tree. The Kaffirs, threatened by drought, asked a missionary to go into the fields with an opened umbrella.¹²⁶ In Sumatra a barren woman made an image of a child and held it in her lap, hoping thereby to become pregnant. In the Babar Archipelago the would-be mother fashioned a doll out of red cotton, pretended to suckle it, and repeated a magic formula; then she sent word through the village that she was pregnant, and her friends came to congratulate her; only a very obstinate reality could refuse to emulate this imagination. Among the Dyaks of Borneo the magician, to ease the pains of a woman about to deliver, would go through the contortions of childbirth himself, as a magic suggestion to the foetus to come forth; sometimes the magician slowly rolled a stone down his belly and dropped it to the ground, in the hope that the backward child would imitate it. In the Middle Ages a spell was cast upon an enemy by sticking pins into a waxen image of him;¹²⁷ the Peruvian Indians burned people in effigy, and called it burning the soul.¹²⁸ Even the modern mob is not above such primitive magic.

These methods of suggestion by example were applied especially to the fertilization of the soil. Zulu medicine-men fried the genitals of a man who had died in full vigor, ground the mixture into a powder, and strewed it over the fields.¹²⁹ Some peoples chose a King and Queen of the May, or a Whitsun bridegroom and bride, and married them publicly, so that the soil might take heed and flower forth. In certain localities the rite included the public consummation of the marriage, so that Nature, though she might be nothing but a dull clod, would have no excuse for misunderstanding her duty. In Java the peasants and their wives, to ensure the fertility of the rice-fields, mated in the midst of them.¹³⁰ For primitive men did not conceive the growth of the soil in terms of nitrogen; they thought of it—apparently without knowing of sex in plants—in the same terms as those whereby they interpreted the fruitfulness of woman; our very terms recall their poetic faith.

Festivals of promiscuity, coming in nearly all cases at the season of sowing, served partly as a moratorium on morals (recalling the comparative freedom of sex relations in earlier days), partly as a means of fertilizing the wives of sterile men, and partly as a ceremony of suggestion to the earth in spring to abandon her wintry reserve, accept the proffered seed, and prepare to deliver herself of a generous litter of food. Such festivals appear among a great number of nature peoples, but particularly among the Cameroons of the Congo, the Kaffirs, the Hottentots and the Bantus. “Their harvest festivals,” says the Reverend H. Rowley of the Bantus,

Similar festivals appear in the historic civilizations: in the Bacchic celebrations of Greece, the Saturnalia of Rome, the Fête des Fous in medieval France, May Day in England, and the Carnival or Mardi Gras of contemporary ways.

Here and there, as among the Pawnees and the Indians of Guayaquil, vegetation rites took on a less attractive form. A man—or, in later and milder days, an animal—was sacrificed to the earth at sowing time, so that it might be fertilized by his blood. When the harvest came it was interpreted as the resurrection of the dead man; the victim was given, before and after his death, the honors of a god; and from this origin arose, in a thousand forms, the almost universal myth of a god dying for his people, and then returning triumphantly to life.¹³² Poetry embroidered magic, and transformed it into theology. Solar myths mingled harmoniously with vegetation rites, and the legend of a god dying and reborn came to apply not only to the winter death and spring revival of the earth but to the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, and the waning and waxing of the day. For the coming of night was merely a part of this tragic drama; daily the sun-god was born and died; every sunset was a crucifixion, and every sunrise was a resurrection.

Human sacrifice, of which we have here but one of many varieties, seems to have been honored at some time or another by almost every people. On the island of Carolina in the Gulf of Mexico a great hollow metal statue of an old Mexican deity has been found, within which still lay the remains of human beings apparently burned to death as an offering to the god.¹³³ Every one knows of the Moloch to whom the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, and occasionally other Semites, offered human victims. In our own time the custom has been practised in Rhodesia.¹³⁴ Probably it was bound up with cannibalism; men thought that the gods had tastes like their own. As religious beliefs change more slowly than other creeds, and rites change more slowly than beliefs, this divine cannibalism survived after human cannibalism disappeared.¹³⁵ Slowly, however, evolving morals changed even religious rites; the gods imitated the increasing gentleness of their worshipers, and resigned themselves to accepting animal instead of human meat; a hind took the place of Iphigenia, and a ram was substituted for Abraham’s son. In time the gods did not receive even the animal; the priests liked savory food, ate all the edible parts of the sacrificial victim themselves, and offered upon the altar only the entrails and the bones.¹³⁶

Since early man believed that he acquired the powers of whatever organism he consumed, he came naturally to the conception of eating the god. In many cases he ate the flesh and drank the blood of the human god whom he had deified and fattened for the sacrifice. When, through increased continuity in the food-supply, he became more humane, he substituted images for the victim, and was content to eat these. In ancient Mexico an image of the god was made of grain, seeds and vegetables, was kneaded with the blood of boys sacrificed for the purpose, and was then consumed as a religious ceremony of eating the god. Similar ceremonies have been found in many primitive tribes. Usually the participant was required to fast before eating the sacred image; and the priest turned the image into the god by the power of magic formulas.¹³⁷

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. A wilderness of weird beliefs came out of animism, and resulted in many strange formulas and rites. The Kukis encouraged themselves in war by the notion that all the enemies they slew would attend them as slaves in the after life. On the other hand a Bantu, when he had slain his foe, shaved his own head and anointed himself with goat-dung, to prevent the spirit of the dead man from returning to pester him. Almost all primitive peoples believed in the efficacy of curses, and the destructiveness of the “evil eye.”¹³⁸ Australian natives were sure that the curse of a potent magician could kill at a hundred miles. The belief in witchcraft began early in human history, and has never quite disappeared. Fetishism*—the worship of idols or other objects as having magic power—is still more ancient and indestructible. Since many amulets are limited to a special power, some peoples are heavily laden with a variety of them, so that they may be ready for any emergency.¹³⁹ Relics are a later and contemporary example of fetishes possessing magic powers; half the population of Europe wear some pendant or amulet which gives them supernatural protection or aid. At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

The philosopher accepts gracefully this human need of supernatural aid and comfort, and consoles himself by observing that just as animism generates poetry, so magic begets drama and science. Frazer has shown, with the exaggeration natural to a brilliant innovator, that the glories of science have their roots in the absurdities of magic. For since magic often failed, it became of advantage to the magician to discover natural operations by which he might help supernatural forces to produce the desired event. Slowly the natural means came to predominate, even though the magician, to preserve his standing with the people, concealed these natural means as well as he could, and gave the credit to supernatural magic—much as our own people often credit natural cures to magical prescriptions and pills. In this way magic gave birth to the physician, the chemist, the metallurgist, and the astronomer.¹⁴⁰

More immediately, however, magic made the priest. Gradually, as religious rites became more numerous and complex, they outgrew the knowledge and competence of the ordinary man, and generated a special class which gave most of its time to the functions and ceremonies of religion. The priest as magician had access, through trance, inspiration or esoteric prayer, to the will of the spirits or gods, and could change that will for human purposes. Since such knowledge and skill seemed to primitive men the most valuable of all, and supernatural forces were conceived to affect man’s fate at every turn, the power of the clergy became as great as that of the state; and from the latest societies to modern times the priest has vied and alternated with the warrior in dominating and disciplining men. Let Egypt, Judea and medieval Europe suffice as instances.

The priest did not create religion, he merely used it, as a statesman uses the impulses and customs of mankind; religion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of men. The priest did harm by tolerating superstition and monopolizing certain forms of knowledge; but he limited and often discouraged superstition, he gave the people the rudiments of education, he acted as a repository and vehicle for the growing cultural heritage of the race, he consoled the weak in their inevitable exploitation by the strong, and he became the agent through which religion nourished art and propped up with supernatural aid the precarious structure of human morality. If he had not existed the people would have invented him.

4. The Moral Function of Religion

Religion and government—Tabu—Sexual tabus—The lag of religion—Secularization

Religion supports morality by two means chiefly: myth and tabu Myth creates the supernatural creed through which celestial sanctions may be given to forms of conduct socially (or sacerdotally) desirable; heavenly hopes and terrors inspire the individual to put up with restraints placed upon him by his masters and his group. Man is not naturally obedient, gentle, or chaste; and next to that ancient compulsion which finally generates conscience, nothing so quietly and continuously conduces to these uncongenial virtues as the fear of the gods. The institutions of property and marriage rest in some measure upon religious sanctions, and tend to lose their vigor in ages of unbelief. Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence “a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.”¹⁴¹ The power of the primitive chief is increased by the aid of magic and sorcery; and even our own government derives some sanctity from its annual recognition of the Pilgrims’ God.

The Polynesians gave the word tabu to prohibitions sanctioned by religion. In the more highly developed of primitive societies such tabus took the place of what under civilization became laws. Their form was usually negative: certain acts and objects were declared “sacred” or “unclean”; and the two words meant in effect one warning: untouchable. So the Ark of the Covenant was tabu, and Uzzah was struck dead, we are told, for touching it to save it from falling.¹⁴² Diodorus would have us believe that the ancient Egyptians ate one another in famine, rather than violate the tabu against eating the animal totem of the tribe.¹⁴³ In most primitive societies countless things were tabu; certain words and names were never to be pronounced, and certain days and seasons were tabu in the sense that work was forbidden at such times. All the knowledge, and some of the ignorance, of primitive men about food were expressed in dietetic tabus; and hygiene was inculcated by religion rather than by science or secular medicine.

The favorite object of primitive tabu was woman. A thousand superstitions made her, every now and then, untouchable, perilous, and “unclean.” The moulders of the world’s myths were unsuccessful husbands, for they agreed that woman was the root of all evil; this was a view sacred not only to Hebraic and Christian tradition, but to a hundred pagan mythologies. The strictest of primitive tabus was laid upon the menstruating woman; any man or thing that touched her at such times lost virtue or usefulness.¹⁴⁴ The Macusi of British Guiana forbade women to bathe at their periods lest they should poison the waters; and they forbade them to go into the forests on these occasions, lest they be bitten by enamored snakes.¹⁴⁵ Even childbirth was unclean, and after it the mother was to purify herself with laborious religious rites. Sexual relations, in most primitive peoples, were tabu not only in the menstrual period but whenever the woman was pregnant or nursing. Probably these prohibitions were originated by women themselves, out of their own good sense and for their own protection and convenience; but origins are easily forgotten, and soon woman found herself “impure” and “unclean.” In the end she accepted man’s point of view, and felt shame in her periods, even in her pregnancy. Out of such tabus as a partial source came modesty, the sense of sin, the view of sex as unclean, asceticism, priestly celibacy, and the subjection of woman.

Religion is not the basis of morals, but an aid to them; conceivably they could exist without it, and not infrequently they have progressed against its indifference or its obstinate resistance. In the earliest societies, and in some later ones, morals appear at times to be quite independent of religion; religion then concerns itself not with the ethics of conduct but with magic, ritual and sacrifice, and the good man is defined in terms of ceremonies dutifully performed and faithfully financed. As a rule religion sanctions not any absolute good (since there is none), but those norms of conduct which have established themselves by force of economic and social circumstance; like law it looks to the past for its judgments, and is apt to be left behind as conditions change and morals alter with them. So the Greeks learned to abhor incest while their mythologies still honored incestuous gods; the Christians practised monogamy while their Bible legalized polygamy; slavery was abolished while dominies sanctified it with unimpeachable Biblical authority; and in our own day the Church fights heroically for a moral code that the Industrial Revolution has obviously doomed. In the end terrestrial forces prevail; morals slowly adjust themselves to economic invention, and religion reluctantly adjusts itself to moral change.* The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than to create new ones.

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.