Evans-Pritchard_Theories Primitive Religion

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THEORIES OFPRIMITIVE RELIGION

BY

E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARDPROFESSOR OF SOCI AL ANTHROPOLOGY

IN THE UN IVERS ITY OF OXFORD

OXFORDAT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1965


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Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTONBOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA

CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAmCBI mADANKUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG

Oxford University Press, 1965

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Ai:: TH E UNIVERSITY PRESS , OXFORDBY VIVIAN RIDLER

PRINTER TO TH E UNIVERSITY

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FOREWORD

F0 U R of these SirD. OwenEvans Lectureswere deliveredat the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in thespring of 1962. They are presented almost entirely aswritten for that occasion, though some paragraphs were notspoken because the lectures would otherwise have exceededthe time al lot ted to me. The Lecture appearing as no. IVhere was written at the same time, bu t as I was asked togive only four lectures, it was not delivered.It will be appreciated that these lectures were for the earandnot for the eye; and also that they were spokento a highlyeducated, but none the less a non-specialist, that is, nonanthropological, audience. Had I been speaking to professional colleagues or even to anthropological students,I would sometimes have expressed myself in somewhatdifferent language, though to the same import.In my comments on Tylor and Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, andPareto I have drawn heavily on articles' published verymanyyears ago in the Bulletin of the Faculry of Arts, EgyptianUniversity (Cairo), in which I once held the Chair of Sociology-articleswhich have circulatedbetween then and now indepartments of Social Anthropology in a mimeographedform, and the main points of which are here set forth.

For criticism and advice I thank Dr. R. G. Lienhardt,Dr. J. H. M. Beattie, Dr. R. Needham, Dr. B. R. Wilson,and Mr. M. D. McLeod. E . E. E.-P .


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CONTENTSI. INTRODUCTION I

II . PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 20

III . SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES 48IV . LEVY-BRUHL 78v. CONCLUSION 10 0

BIBLIOGRAPHY 12 3

INDEX 13 1,

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INTRODUCTION

T HESE lectures examine the manner in which variouswriters who can be regarded as anthropologists, or atany rate as writing in the anthropological field, haveattempted to understand and account for the religious be- (liefs and practices of primitive peoples. I should make it clear. at the outset that I shal l be primari ly concerned only withtheories about the religionsofprimitive peoples. More generaldiscussions about religion outside those limits are peripheralto my subject. I shall therefore keep to what may broadlybe considered to be anthropological writings, and for themost part to British writers.You will note that our present \interest is less in primitive religions than i n the varioustheories which have been put forward purporting to offer anexplanation of them.If anyone were to ask what interest the religions of thesimpler peoples can have for us, I would. reply in the firstplace that some of the most important political, social, andmoral philosophers from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau toHerbert Spencer, Durkheim, and Bergson have consideredthe facts of primitive life to have great significance for the vunderstanding of social life in general; and I would remarkfurther that the men who have been most responsible forchanging the whole climate of thought in our civilizationdur ing the last century, the g reat myth-makers Darwin,Marx-Engels, Freud, and Frazer (and perhaps I should addComte), all showed an intense interest in primitive peoplesand used what was known about them in their endeavours toconvince us that, though what had given solace and encouragement in the pas t could do so no more, all was notlost; seen down the vistas of history the struggle did avail.In the second place, I would reply that primitive religions . ; /are species of the genus religion, and that al l who have any823123 B


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2 INTRODUCTIONinterest in religion must acknowledge that a study of thereligious ideas and practices of primitive peoples, which are ofgreat variety, may help us to reach certain conclusions aboutthe nature of religion in general, and therefore also about theso-called higher religions or historical and positive religionsor the religions of revelation, including ou r own. Unlikethese h igher religions, which are genet ically related-IJudaism, Christianity, and Islam, or Hinduism, Buddhism,and J ainism-primitive religions in isolated and widelyseparated parts of the world can scarcely be other than infiependent developments without historical relations betweenI them, so they provide all the more valuable data for a com

I parative analysis aiming at determining the essential charac, teristics of religious phenomena and making general, valid,and significant statements about them.I am of course aware that theologians, classical historians,Semitic scholars, and other students of religion often ignoreprimitive religions as being of little account, but I takecomfort in the reflection that less than a hundred years agoMax iiller was battl ing against the same complacentlyentrench'ed forces for the recognition of the languages andreligions o f Ind ia and China as important for an understanding oflanguage and religion in general, a fight which itis t rue has yet to be won (where are the departments of comparative linguisticsand comparativereligionin this country?),but in which some advance has been made. Indeed I would

"- go further and say that, to understand fully the nature ofl : e v e a l e c ! ~ ~ e l i g i o n , we have to under stand the nature of soc a l l e a i J . a t u r a L [ ~ l i g i o n , for nothing could have been revealedabout anything i f men had not already had a n idea aboutthat thing. Or rather, perhaps we should say, t h ~ J ; l i c h o J 9 m ybetween natural and revealed r e l i g i o n i s : . J ( ) J g : ~ p - d makes forobscurity, for there is a good sense in which it may be saidthat all religions are religions of revelation: the world aroundthem and their reason have everywhere revealed to mensomething of the divine and of their own nature and destiny.We might ponder the words of St. Augustine: 'What is nowcalled the Christian religion, has existed among the ancients,and was not absent from the beginning of the human race,

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INTRODUCTION 3until Chr is t came in t he flesh: from which time the truereligion,which existed already, began to be called Christian.'II have no hesitation in claiming furthermore that thoughstudents'ofthehigher religionsmay sometimes look down theirnoses at us anthropologists and our primitive religions-wehave no texts-it is we more than anyone who have broughttogether the vast material on a study of which the science ofcomparative religion has been, however insecurely, founded;and, however inadequate the anthropological theories basedon it may be, they could serve, and sometimes have served,classical,Semitic, and Indo-European scholars, and alsoEgyptologists in the interpretation of their texts. We shallbe reviewing some of these theories in t he course of theselectures, so I may here merely say that I have in mind theimpact on many learned disciplines of the writings of Tylorand Frazer in this country and of Durkheim, Hubert andMauss, and LeVy-Bruhl ill; France. We may not today findthem acceptable, but in the ir time they have played animportant part in th storyof thought.It is not eas t define) what we are to understancl.by religion for the purp2.se of these lectures. W ~ r e theirempl1a-sls-'---'fu-oe-on beliefs and practices, we might well accep(lnitiallySir Edward Tylor's minimum definition of religion (thoughthere are diffiCiiiti.es attached to it) as beliefin spiritual. beings, but since the emphasis is rather on theories of primitive religion, I am not free to choose one definition ratherthan another, since I have to discuss a number of hypotheseswhjch go beyond Tylor's minimum definition. Some wouldrrinclude under the religious rubric such topics as magic, ltotemism, taboo, and even witchcraft-everything, that is, )which may be covered by the expression 'primitive mentality' or wha t to the European scholar has appeared tobe 'irrational or superstitious. I shall have in par ticular to make :repea1ecf references to magic, because several influentialwriters do not differentiate between magic and religion andspeak of the magico-religious, or regard them as geneticallyrelated in an evolutionary development; others again,

1 August. Retr. i. 13. Quoted in F. M. Miiller, Selected Essu,ys on Language,Mythology and Religion, 1881, i. 5.


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INTRODUCTION 5for primitive man's beliefs and for the origin and development of religion could ever have been propounded. It is notjust that we now know in the light ofmodern research whattheir authors could not then have known. That, of course, istrue; but even on the facts available to them it is astoundingthat so much could have been written which appears to be-contrary to common sense. Yet these men were scholars andof great learning and ability. To comprehendwhat now seemto be obviously faulty interpretations and explanations, wewould have to write a treat ise on the climate of thought oftheir time, the intellectual circumstances which set bounds

.J, t? their thought, a curious mixture of positivism, evolution-J;f-:'-ism; and the remains of a sentimental religiosity. We shall be/1l\ surveying some of these theories in later lectures, but I shouldlike here and now to commend to you as a locus classicus theat-one-time widely read and influential Introduction to theHistory of Religion by F. B. Jevons, then (1896) a teacher ofphilosophy in the University of Durham. Religion for himwas a uniform evolutionary development from totemismanimism being 'rather a primitive philosophical theory thana fbrm of religious belief'l-to polytheism to monotheism;but I do not intend to discuss, or disentangle, his theories.I only ins tance the book as the best example I know forillustrating how erroneous theories about primitive religionscan be, for I believe it would be t rue to say that there is nogeneral, or theoretical, statement abou t them in it whichwould pass muster today. It is a collection of absurdreconstructions, unsupportable hypotheses arid conjectures, wild--speculations, suppositions and assumptions, inappropriateanalogies, misunderstandings and misinterpretations, and,especially in what he wrote about totemism, just plain nonsense.If some of the theories put before you appear rather naIve,I would ask you to bear certain facts in mind. Anthropologywas still in its infancy-it has ha rdly ye t grown up. Ti llrecendy it has been the happy hunting ground of men ofletters and has been speculative and philosophical in a ratherold-fashioned way. If psychology c an be said to have taken

I F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion, 18g6, p. 206.

4 INTRODUCTIONI whilst distinguishing between them, give a similar type ofl explanation of both.Victorian and Edwardian scholars were intensely inter-__ested in religions of rude peoples, largely, I suppose, becausethey faced a crisis in their own; and many books and articleshave been written on the subject . Indeed, were I to refer toall their authors , these lectures would be clogged with arecitation of names and tides. The alternative I shall adoptis to select those writers who have been most influential orwho are most characteristic of one or other way of analysingthe facts, and discuss their theories as representative ofvarieties of anthropological thought. What may be lost bythis procedure in detailed treatment is compensated for bygreater clarity.Theories of primitive religion may conveniendy be considered under the headings of psychological and sociologi___ the psychological being further divided into-and here Iuse Wilhelm Schmidt's terms-intellectualist and emotion-_-----alist theories. This classification, which also accords roughlywith historical succession, will serve its expository purpose,though some writers fall between these headings or comeunder more than one of them.

My treatment of them may seem to you severe and negative. I think you will not regard my strictures as too severewhen you see how inadequate, even ludicrous, is much o fwhat has been written in explanation ofreligious phenomena.Laymenmaynot be aware that most ofwhat has been writtenin the past, and with some assurance, and is still trotted outin colleges and universities, about animism, totemism,magic, &c., has been shown to be erroneous or at l e a s ~dubious. My task has therefore to be critical rather thanconstructive, to show why theories at one time accepted areunsupportable and had, or have, to be rejected wholly o r inpart. If I can persuade you that much is still very uncertainand obscure, my labour will not have been in vain. You willthen not be under any illusion that we have final answers tothe questions posed.Indeed, looking backwards, it is sometimes difficult tounderstand howmany of the theories put forward to account


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6 INTRODUCTIONthe first steps towards scientific autonomy round about 1860and not to have rid itself of the trammels of its philosophicalpast till forty or fifty years later, social anthropology, whichtook its first steps at about the same time, has yet morerecently shed similar encumbrances.It is a remarkable fact that none of the anthropologistswhose theories about primitive religion have been most influential ever beennear a p . ! i ~ t i v e people. It is as thougha chemist hacf!rever1irouglifit necessary-tOenter a laboratory. They had consequently to rely for their information onwhat European explorers, missionaries, administrators, andtraders told them. Now, I want to make it clear that thisevidence is highly suspect. I do not say that it was fabricated,though sometimes it was; and even such famous travellersas Livingstone, Schweinfurth, and Palgrave were given togross carelessness. But much o f i t was false and almost allofit was unreliable and, by modern standards of professionalresearch, casual, superficial, ou(of p e ~ s p e c t i v e , o)ltof c ( ) E ! < ; ~ t ;and to some extent this was t rue everiof the earlier professional anthropologists. I say with the greatest deliberationabout early descriptions of the simpler peoples ' ideas andbehaviour, and even more of the interpretations of them pu tforward, that statements cannot be taken at their face valueand should not be accepted without critical examination oftheir sources and without weighty corroborative evidence.Anyone who has done research among primitive peoplesearlier visited by explorers and others can bear witness thattheir reports are only too often unreliable, even about matters whichcan be noted by bare observation,while about suchmatters as religious beliefs which cannot be so noted theirstatements may be qui te untrue . I give a single examplefrom a region with which I am well acquainted. In view ofrecent papers and extensive monographs on the religions ofthe Northern Nilotes, it is strange to read what the famousexplorer Sir Samuel Baker said about them in an address to,the Ethnological Society of London in 1866: 'Without anyexception, they are without a beli ef in a Supreme Being,nei ther have they any form of worship or idolatry; nor isthe darkness qf the ir minds enl ightened by even a ray of

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INTRODUCTION 7superstition. The mind is as stagnant as the morass whichforms its puny world.'l As early as 1871 Sir Edward Tylorwas able to show from the evidence even then available thatthis could not be true.2 Statements about a people's religiousbeliefs must always be treated with the greatest caution, forwe are then dealing with what ~ E u r o p e a ~ nor nativecan directly observe, with C O I ) J ~ < ; p ! i o n s , i m a g ~ s , ' w ' Q ' i . ' q ' ~ , whichrequire for understanding a thorough knowledge ofapeople'slangUage. an.d also an aw.arenes..s.of.... _ . t . b e . ~ n t i r ~ ~ y ~ ~ e _ ~ 9 f i d e a s _ ( \\:ofwhich a n y ~ j : i c l J l a d i e . l i e L i s _ . p - a r t... for it may bemeaning--Tess' wnen-dhrorced from the set of beliefs and practices to.which it belongs. Very rarely could it be said that in additionto these qualifications the observer had a scientific habit of 'mind. It is true that some missionaries were well educatedmen and had lea rn t to speak native languages with fluency,but speaking a language fluently is very differe.,!lt f ~ . o m under- ':standing it, as I have often obserVed in converse-between \\ Europeans and Africans and Arabs. Forhere there is anew \

1) ,ca!1se .of misunderstanclip.g,._a frc:,s!t:... haza.rd,' Native.and.)missionary are using the same words bu t the. connotations.I are different , they carry different loads ' of zrieaillng: Isomeone who has not made an intensive study of na t ive [institutions, habits, and customs i n the native's oWn milieu i( that is, well away from adminis trat ive, missionary, andtrading posts) at best there can emerge a sort of middle,- ( ' . ~ ' . cf ldialect in which it is possible to communicate about matters -of common experience and interes t. We need only take forexample the use of a nat ive word for our 'God'. The mean-ing of the word for the nat ive speaker may have only theslightest coincidence, and in a very restricted context, withthe missionary's conception ofGod. The late ProfessorHocartcites an actual example of such misunderstandings, from'Fiji: \'.When the missionary speaks of God as ndina, he means thatall other gods are non-existent. The native understands that Heis the only effective, reliable god; the others may be effective at

I S. W. Baker, 'The Races of the Nile Basin', Transaction of the EthnologicalSociety of London, N.S. v (r867), 231.2 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd edit. (18g1), i. 423-4.


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8 INTRODUCTIONtimes, but are not to be depended upon. This is but one exampleofhow the teacher may mean one thing and his pupil understandanother. Qenerally the t w 0 E < t J : ' ~ e _ ~ ~ Q ! l t i . . I l ~ e b l i ~ s f u l l y i g n o r a n t ofthe misunderstanding;-11lere is no remedy for i t, except in them i s ~ ~ i n g : - a thorough knowledge of native customsand beliefs.I

;r Furthermore, the reports.used by scholars to illustrateI their theories were not--only h i g . ~ l y i I ! . ~ < ! < : g u a t e but-andI this is what chiefly relates to the topic of these lectures-they were also highly selectAve!. What travellers liked to puti on paper was what most struck them as curious, crude, andI sensational. Magic, barbaric religious rites, superstitious! beliefs, took precedence over the daily empirical, humdrumroutines which comprise nine-tenths of the life of primitive man and are his chiefintexest andco:llcern: his hunting

and fishing and collecting of roots and fruits, his cultivatingI, and herding , his building, his fashioning of tools and\ weapons, and in general his occupation in his daily affairs,domestic and public. These were not allotted the space theyfill, in both time and importance, in the lives of those whoseway of life was being described. Consequently, by..$Yins-__

i undue attention--to what they regarded as curious superstit ions, the occult and mysterious, observers tended to painta p ic tu re in which the mystical (in Levy-Bruhl' s sense ofthat word) took up a far greater portion of the canvas thani t has in the lives of primitive peoples, so that the empirical, the ordinary, the common-sense, the workaday worldseemed to have only a secondaryimportance, and the natives. were made to look childish and in obvious need of fatherly

J administration and missionary zeal, especially i f there was_ \ ayelcome bi t of obscenity in their rites.'!.-/ T ~ e n the scholars got to work on the pieces of informationI I prOVIded for them haphazardly and from all over the world,i . and built them into books with such picturesque ti tles as1 . 'The Golden Bough and The Mystic Rose. These books presented' ~ / a composite image, or r a t h ~ a r i c a t u r e , ofthe primitivemind:superstitious, childlike, incapable of eithercritical or sustainedthought. Examples of this procedure, this promiscJlOUS-...use

.----I A. M. Hocart, 'Mana', Man, 1914,46.

INTRODUCTION 9of evidence, might be culled from any writer of the period:thusThe Amaxosa drink the gall ofan ox to make themselves fierce.The notorious Mantuana drank the gall ofthirty chiefs, believingit would render him strong. Many peoples, for instance theYorubas, believe that the 'blood is the life'. The New Caledonians

eat slain enemies to acquire courage and strength. The flesh of aslain enemy is eaten in Timorlaut to cure impotence. The peopleofHalmahera drink the blood ofslain enemies in order to becomebrave. In Amboina, warriors drink the blood ofenemies they havekilled to acquire their courage. The people of Celebes drink theblood of enemies to make themselves strong. The natives of theDieri and neighbouring tribes will eat a man and drink his bloodin order to acquire his strength; the fat is rubbed on sick people}And so on an d on and on through volume after volume.

How well was this procedure satirized by Malinowski, to ,whom must go much of the credi t for having outmoded byridicule and example both the sort of inquiries which hadpreviously been prosecuted among the simpler peoples andthe use scholars had made of them. He speaks of 'the lengthy,litanies of threaded statement, make us a n t h r o p o l o ~ t sfeel silly and t h ~ s a , \ , , ~ g ~ J _ Q o k - r i d i G - 1 : l r o U S ' ; such as 'Amongthe Brobdignacians [sic] whenamanmeets hismother-in-law,-"'the two abuse each other and each retires with a black eye';'When a Brodiag encounters a polar bear he runs away andsometimes the bear follows'; 'I n old Caledoniawhen a nativeaccidentally finds a whisky bottle by the road-side he emptiesit at one gulp, after which he proceeds immediate ly to lookfor another.'2 \ IWe have observed that selection on the level of bare (observation had already prOCtucee(an initial distortion. The _. ~ - - - -'sctsSOIs-a!iQ-paste method of c o m p i l a t i 6 i i - " l 5 y ~ m c h a i r 2-scholars at home led to further distortion. On the whole, theylackedany sense 2 f . b . i s t o r : i c a l ~ G . . i ~ m , the rules--anhistorian--" 11applies ~ l u a t i n g documentary evidence. Then, i f a "false impression was created by observers of primitive peoplesgiving undue prominence to the mystical in their lives, it was

I A. E . Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1927 edit. (revised and enlarged byTheodore Besterman), i. 134-5.2 B. Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, 1926, p. 126.


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developments, decadence, survivals, o rby some other ev..Q1.'U:::_Jionary trEk. For early anthropological theories, as you willsee in my next lecture, not only sought explanations ofprimitive religion in psychological origins, bu t also attempted toplace it in an evolutionary gradation or as a stage in socialdevelopment. A chain oflogical developmentwasdeductivelyconstructed. In the absence of historical records it could notbe said withany conviction that in any particular instance historical development corresponded to the logical paradigmindeed from the middle of la st century there raged a bat tl ebetween those in favour of the theory of progression and thosein favour of the theory of degradation, the former holdingthat primitive societies were in a state of early and, retardedthough it might be, progressive development towards civilization, and the latter that they had once been in a morehighly civilized condition and ha d regressed from it. Thedebate especially concerned religion, it being held by theone party that what they considered to be rather elevatedtheological ideas found among some primitive peoples werea first glimpse of truth that would eventually lead to higher'things, and by the other party that those beliefs were a relico f an earlier and more civilized state. Herbert Spencer preserved an open mind on this issue,1 but the other anthropologists, except Andrew Lang and to some extentMaxMiiller,and sociologists were progressionists. In the absence ofhis torical evidence to show the phases rude societies havein fact passed through, they were assumed to be of an ascending, and very often an invariable, order. All thatwas requiredwas to find an example somewhere, no matterwhere, whichmore or less corresponded to one or other stage of logical development and to insert it as an illustration, or as the writersseemed to regard it, as proof, of the historical validity ofthis or that scheme ofunilinear progression. Were I addressing a purelyanthropological audience, even to allude to suchpast procedures might be regarded as flogging dead horses.The difficulties were, I believe, i n G r e ~ s e d , and the resultantdistortion made greater, by the ~ i _ : Q i I l g . x > - f . - s p c ~ to-dq'cnJ?'i'frlln itive religions, t h e r e ~ t l i e mind

I H. Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 1882, i. 106.

10 INTRODUCTIONembossed by scrap-book treatment, which was dignified bybeing labelled t!:.e 'comparative method'. This consisted,withrespect to our subject, of taking from the first-hand recordsabout primitive peoples, and willy-nil ly from all over theworld, wrenching the facts yet further from their contexts,

'- - ......---- - .. ---- '-.--... - - - - - ~ ._u__ . _. --=---=--------- .. -----only what referred to the strange, weird, m y s t i c a l ~ super-stitious-use which words we may-and piec ing the bitstogether in a monstrous mosaic, which was supposed to portray the mind o - r - - p n m m v e - ~ m a n . Primitive man was thusmade to appear, especially in Levy-Bruhl's earlier books, asquite irrational (in the usual sense ofthat word), living in amysterious world of doubts and fears, in terror of the supernatural and ceaselessly occupied in coping with it. Such apicture, I think any anthropologist of today would agree, isa tQ@1 distortion.r As a matte r of fact, the 'comparat ive method' when so

! used is a misnomer. There was precious little comparison, i f, we mean a%lytical c:pmparison. There wasmerelya 'E)iir;gingtogether of items which appeared to have something incoIIlmon. We can indeed say for it that i t enaoledthewritersto make preliminary classifications in which vast numbersof observations could be placed under a limited number ofrubrics, thereby introducing some sort of order; ~ ~ u j h i L_ ~ _ l ~ e . But it was an ~ ~ ~ . r a W e r than a comparatIve metnbd, almost what psychologists used to cal l the' a n ~ c d o t a l IIlethod'. A large number of miscellaneous examples ' W e r e < b r ~ g h t together to i llus trate some general ideaand in support of the author's thesis about that idea. There7was no attempt to test theories by unselected examples. The

~ ~ o s t elementary precautions were neglected as wild surmisefollowed on wild surmise (called hypotheses). The simplestrules of inductive logic (methods of agreement, difference,and concomitant variations) were ignored. Thus, to give asingle example, if God is, as Freud would have i t, a projection of the idealized and sublimated image of the father, thenclearly it is necessary to show that conceptions of deities vary\ ~ i t h the very different places the father has in the family in" different types of society. Then again, negative instances, ifconsidered at all, which was rare, were dismissed as later

INTRODUCTION u


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12 INTRODUCTIONof the primitive was so different from ours that its ideas couldnot be expressed in our vocabularies and categories. Primitive religion was 'animism', 'pre-animism', 'fetishism', andthe like. Or, terms were taken over from native languages,as though none could be found in our own language resembling what had to be described, such terms as taboo (fromPolynesia), mana (from Melanesia), totem (from the Indiansof Nor th America), and baraka (from the Arabs of NorthAfrica). I am not denying that the semantic difficulties in

---a-anslation are great. They are considerable enough between,shall we say, French and English; but when some primitivelanguage has to be rendered into our own tongue they are,! and for obvious reasons, much more formidable. They are infact the major problem we are confronted with in the subjectwe are discussing, so I hope I may be allowed to pursue the'\. matter a little further. I f an ethnographer says t ha t i n the

I: \ language of a Central African people the word ango meansdog, he would be entirely correct, bu t he has only to a very~ m i t e d degree thereby conveyed the meaning of ango, forwhat it m e a B S - . . t o ~ who use the word is very different to what 'dog' means to an Englishman. The significancedW have for ~ - t h e y hunt with them, ffiey eat tnem;and so on-is n ~ ~ m . ~ ~ i g n i f i . c a n c e . . t b . e 1 l a \ l e f o r _ u s .Howmuchgreater is t h e ~ l s p l a c e m e n t likely to be whenwecome totermswhich have a I ? ~ ~ y s i ~ ~ ~ e r e n c e ! One can, as has beendone, use native w o r d - s - ' ~ m d then demonstrate their meani!.Igby their u s ~ i n d i f f e r e n 1 : q ) ~ n a U s i t u a _ t i o n s . But there isclearly a limit to this expedient. Reduced to an absurdity itwould mean writing an account of a people in their own ver-:n a c u l a r . ~ h e alternatives are perilous. One can standardize"a word taken from a primitive vernacular, like totem:ana-useit to describe phenomena among other peoples which resemble what it refers to in its originarl:i"'ome; but this cancause...Qf great confusion, because t h e ~ i J l a n c e s -.may s u ~ f i c i a l , and the phenomena in question so dl~ e r s i f i e d t h a t tIreteirn loses all meaning, which,mdeed, asGoldenweiser showed,rJias beent:6:efate of theword totem.rIA. A. Goldenweiser, Early Civilization, 1921, pp. 282 fr. See al so hispaper 'Form and Content in Totemism', American Anthropologist, N.S. xx (1918 ).

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INTRODUCTION 13I emphasize this predicament because it has some importance for an understanding of theories of primitive religion.One may, indeed, find some word or phrase in one's ownlanguage by which to translate a nat ive concept . We maytranslate some word of theirsoy'god' or 'spirit' or 'soul' or \ '-.:: - / ~ _

'ghost', bu t then we have to ask not only what thewordwe so , ,- __ \\.translate means to the natives but alsowhat thewordbywhich/ .)"it is translated means to the translator and his readers. We Ihave to dcterffiineadouble _~ e : E i l l g ; ~ ; c i . ~ i s t t l f e r e canbe no more than a ~ r t i a l overlapofmeaning between thetwo w o r ~ . - - - .emantic difficulties re always considerable and canonly b e p overcome. he p roblem t hey p resentmay beviewed also in reverse, in the a tt empt by missionaries totranslate the Bible into native tongues. It was bad enoughwhen Greek metaphysical concepts had to be expressed inLatin, and, as we know, misunderstandings arose from thistransportation of concepts from the one language into theother. Then the Bible was translated into various other Euro-

I pean languages, English, French, German, Italian, &c., andI have found it an illuminating experiment to take someportion of it, shall we say a Psalm, and see how these differentlanguages have stamped it with their particular characters.Those who know Hebrew or some other Semit ic languagecan complete the game by then translating these versionsback into its idiom and seeing what they look like then.

How much more desperate is the case of primitive languages! I have read somewhere of the predicament ofmissionaries to the Eskimoes in trying to render into their tonguethe word ' lamb', as in the sentence 'Feed my lambs'. Youcan, of course, render it by reference to some animal withwhich the Eskimoes are acquainted, by saying, for instance,'Feed my seals', but clearly if you do so you replace the- r e p r e s e ~ i o n of what a lamb was for a Hebrew shepherdoY"fl:la.t of what a seal may be to an Eskimo. How is oneto convey the meaning of the statement that the horses ofthe Egyptians 'are flesh and not spirit' to a people whichhas never seen a horse or anything like one, and may alsohave no concept corresponding to the Hebrew conception of


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I H. Bergson, The Two Sources ofMorality and Religion, 1956 edit., p. 103.2 'Religion and the Anthropologists', Blackfriars, Apr. 1960. Reprinted inEssays in Social Anthropology, 1962.

been, the persons whose writ ings have been most influent ial have been at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists.Primitive religion was with regard to its validity no differentfrom any other religious faith, an illusion. It was notjust thatthey asked, as Bergson put it, how it is that 'beliefs and practices which are anything but reasonable could have been,and still are, accepted by reasonable beings'.I It was ratherthat implicit in their thinking were the optimistic convictions of the eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers thatpeople are stupid and bad only because they have bad institutions, and they have bad institutions only because theyare ignorant and superstitious, and they are ignorant andsuperstitious because they have been exploited in the nameof religion by cunning and avaricious priests and the unscrupulous classes which have supported them. We should, Ithink, realizewhatwas the intention ofmany of these scholarsi fwe are to understand their theoretical constructions. Theysought, and found, in primitive religions a weapon whichcould, they thought, be used with deadly. effect againstChristianity. Ifprimitive religion could be explained away asan intellectual aberration, as a mirage-induced by emotionalstress, o rby its social function, it was implied that the higherreligions could be discredited and disposed o f i n the samew ~ . T h i s intention is scarcely concealed in some cases-F r ~ ? _ ~ r , King, and Clodd, for example. I do not doubt theirsincerity and, as I have indicated elsewhere,2 they have mysympathy, though not my assent. However, whether theywere right or wrong is beside the point , which is tha t theimpassioned rationalism of the time has coloured their assessment of primitive religions and has given their writings, aswe read them today, a flavour of smugness which one mayfind either irritating or risible. _Religious beliefwas to these anthropologists absurd, andit is so to most anthropologists of yesterday and today. Butsome explanation of the absurdity seemed to be required,and i t was offered in psychological or sociological terms. It

I

14 INTRODUCTIONspirit? These are trite examples. May I give two more complicated ones?How do-yo.1l..tr.anslateinto Hottentot 'Though_...-- -------,.I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have notcharity . . .' ? In the first place, you have to determine whatthe passage meant to St. Paul's hearers; and, apart from 'thetongues of men and of angels', what exegetical learning hasgone to the elucidation of eros, agape, and caritas! Then youhave to find equivalents in Hottentot , and, since there arenone, you do the best you can. Or how do you render intoan Amerindian language 'I n the beginning was the word'?

,...-Even in its English form the meaning can only be set for ththeological disquisition. Missionaries have battled hardand with great sincerity to overcome these difficulties, butin my experience much of what they t e ~ ~ 1 1 . n a t i Y : e s j ~ _ 9 . 1 A ! ~. u . n i u t d J i - Z i Q ~ e to those amongwhomthey labour, and manyof them would, I think, recognize this. The solution oftenadopted is to transform the minds of native children intoEuropean minds, bu t then this is only in appea rance asolution. I must, having I hope brought this missionaryproblem to your attention, nowleave it, for these lectures arenot on missiology, a fascinating field of research, unhappilyas yet little tilled.

Nor do I therefore discuss the more general quest ion oftranslation any further here, for it cannot be treated priefly.We all knowthe tag 'traduttore, traditore'. I mention thematterin my introductory lecture partly because we have to bearin mind, in estimating theories of primitive religion, whatthe words used in them meant to the scholars who used them.If one is to understand the interpretations of primitive mentality they pu t forward, one has to know thei r own mental ity, broadly where they stood; to enter into their way oflooking at things, a way of their class, sex, and period. As faras rel igion goes, they all had, as far as I know, a rel igiousbackground in one form or another. To mention some nameswhich are most likely to be familiar to you: Tylor had beenbrought up a Quaker, Frazer a Presbyterian, Marett in theChurch ofEngland, Malinowski a Catholic, whileDurkheim,Levy-Bruhl, and Freud had a Jewish background; but withone or two exceptions, whatever the background may have

INTRODUCTION 15

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times not been kept distinct, even in the minds of goodscholars.Somuch by way of some introductoryremarks, whichwerenecessary before embarking on our voyage into an ocean ofpast thought. As is the case with any, and every, science weshall find on many an isle the graves of shipwrecked sailors;butwhen welook back onthe whole history ofhuman thoughtwe need not despair because as yet we know so little of thenature of primitive religion, or, indeed, of religion in general,and because we have to dismiss as merely conjectural, merelyplausible, theories purporting to explain it. Rather we musttake courage and pursue our studies in the spirit of the deadsailor of the Greek Anthology epigram:

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,Bids you set sail.Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,Weathered the gale.

18 INTRODUCTIONwe shall find that it will often be unnecessary for me to pointout the inadequacies ofone or otherpoint of view because therequired criticism is contained in the writingsof otherauthorsmentioned later. This being so, it may be well to add, andI am sure you will agree, tha t i t must not be supposed thatthere can be only one sort of general statement which can bemade about social phenomena, and t hat others must bewrong if that one is right. There is no apriori reason why thesetheories purporting to explain primitive religion in termsrespectively of ratiocination, emotion, and social functionshould not all be correct , each supplementing the others ,though I do not believe that they are. Interpretation can beon different levels. Likewise there is no reason why severaldifferent explanations of the same type, o ron the same level,should not all be right so long as they do not contradict eachother, for each may explain different features of the samephenomenon. In point of fact, however, I find all the theorieswe shall examine together no more than plausible and even,as they have been propounded, unacceptable in t hat theycontain contradictions and other logical inadequacies, or inthat they cannot, as stated, be proved either true or false, orfinally, and most to the point, in tha t ethnographic evidenceinvalidates them.A final word: some people today find it embarrassing tohear peoples described as primitives or natives, and evenmore so to hear them spoken of as savages. But I am sometimes obliged to use the designations ofmy authors, whowrotein the robust language of a time when offence to the peoplesthey wrote about could scarcely be given, the good time ofVictorian prosperity and progress, and, one may add, smugness, our pomp ofyesterday. But the words are used by me~ . w : h a t W e b e r ~ a value-free sense,anathey are etym-o=logically u n o b j e c t i o n a b l ~ e , the use of the word'primitive' to describe peoples living in small-scale societieswith a s imple material cul ture and lacking literature is toofirmly established to be elimi;nated. This is unfortunate,because no word has caused greater confusion in anthropological writings, as you will see, for it can have a logicaland a chronological sense and the two senses have some-

INTRODUCTION 19


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I IPSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

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T HE theory of President de Brosses,! a contemporaryand correspondent of Voltaire, that religion originatedin fetishism, was accepted unt il the middle of lastI century. The thesis, taken up by Comte,z was that fetishism,. the worship, according to Portuguese sailors, of inanimatethings and of animals by the coastal Negroes of West Mrica,developed into polytheism and polytheism into monotheism.It was replaced by theories, couched in intellectualist termsand under the influence of the associationalist psychology ofthe t ime, which may be designated as the ghost theory andthe soul theory, both taking it for granted that primitive manis essentially rational, though his attempts to explain puzzlingphenomena are crude and fallacious.But before these theories became generally accepted theyhad to contest the field with others of the nature-myth school,a contest all the more bitterly fought in that both were of thesame intellectualist genre. I discuss very briefly naturemyth account of the origin of religion first, partly becauseit was first in time, and also because what happened laterwas a reaction to animistic theories,nature mythology havingceased, at any rate in this country, to have any followingand significance.

The nat ll re-myth school was predominant ly a Germanschool, and -Itwasmostly concerned with Indo-Europeanreligions, its thesis being that the gods of antiquity, and byimplication gods anywhere and at all times, were no morethan personified natural phenomena : sun , moon, stars,dawn, the spring renewal, mighty rivers, &c. The mostpowerful representative of this school was Max Muller (son

I Ch. R. de Brosses, Du Culle des dieux fttiches au parallete de l'anciennereligionde l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de la Nigritie, 1760.

2 Comte, Cours de philosophic positive, 1908 edit., 52"-54:e les:on.

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PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 21of the romantic poet Wilhelm Muller), a German scholar of /the solar-myth b r a n c 1 l . ~ ~ c h o o l ( the various branches did .a good dealof wrangling among themselves), who spent mostof his life at Oxford, where he was Professor and a Fellow ofAll Souls. He was a linguist of quite exceptional ability, oneof the leading Sanskritists of his time, and in general a man ofgreat erudition; and he has been most unjustly decried. Hewas not prepared to go as far as some of his more extremeGerman colleagues, not just because at Oxford in those daysit was dangerous to be an agnostic, but from conviction, forhe was a pious and sentimental Lutheran; but he got fairlynear their position, and, by tacking and veering in his manybooks to avoid it, he rendered his thought sometimes ambi-guous and opaque. In his view, as I understand it, men havealways had an intuition of the divine, the idea of the Infinite-his word for God-deriving from sensory experiences;so we do not have to seek itssource in primitive revelation orin a religious instinct or faculty, as some people then did.. IAll human knowledge comes through th e senses, that oftouch giving the sharpes t impression of reality, and allreasoning is based on them, and this is true of religion also: )nihil in fide quod non ante fuerit in sensu. Now, things which areintangible, like the sun and the sky, gave men the idea of the .infinite and also furnished the material for deities. MaxMuller di d not wish to be understood as suggesting that! /rel igion began by men deifying grand natural objects, but V'rather that these gave him a feeling of the infinite and alsoserved as symbols for it.Mullerwas chiefly interested in the gods ofIndia and oftheclassical world, though he tried his hand at the interpreta- [../tion of some primitive material and certainly believed thathis explanations had general validity. His thesis was that theinfinite, once the idea had arisen, could only be thoughtofin /metaphor and symbol, which could only be taken from what 'vseemed majestic in the known world, such as the heavenlybodies, or rather their attributes. But these attributes thenlost their original metaphorical sense and achieved autonomyby becoming personified as deities in their own right . Thenomina became numina. So religions, of this sort at any rate,


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22 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESmight be described as a 'disease of language' , a pithy butunfortunate expression which later Muller tried to explainaway but never quite lived down. It follows, he held, thatthe only way we can discover the meaning of the religion ofearly man is by philological and etymological research,which restores to the names of gods and the stories told aboutthem the ir or iginal sense. Thus , Apollo loved Daphne;Daphne fled before him and was changed into a laurel tree.This legendmakes no sense till weknow thatoriginally Apollowas a solar deity, and Daphne, the Greek name for thelaurel, or rather the bay t ree, was the name for the dawn.This tells us the originalmeaningof the myth: the sun chasingaway the dawn.Muller deals with belief in the human soul and its ghostlyform in a similar manner. When men wished to express adistinction between the body and something theyfelt in themother than the body, the name that suggested itself wasbreath, something immaterial and obviously connected withlife. Then this word 'psyche' came to express the principleof life, and then the soul, the mind, the sel After death thepsyche went into Hades, the place of the invisible. Once theopposition of body to soul had thus been established in language and thought, philosophy began its work on i t, aridspiritualistic and materialistic systems of philosophy arose;and all this to put together againwhat language had severed.So language exercises a tyranny over thought, and thoughtis always struggling against it, bu t in vain. Similarly, theword for ghost originally meant breath, and the word forshades (of the departed) meant shadows. They were at firstfigurative expressions which eventually achieved concreteness.There can be no doubt that Muller and his fellow naturemythologists carried their theories to the point of absurdity;he claimed that the siege of Troy was no more than a solar

myth: and to reduce. this sort of interpretation to farce,someone, I believe, wrote a pamphlet inquiring whetherMaxMuller himself was not a solar myth! Leaving out of consideration the mistakes in classical scholarship we now knownto have been such, it is evident that, however ingenious

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 23explanations of the kindmight be, they were not , and could /notbe, S ~ E . Q ! ! e " d . . . b . a . d ~ ~ ~ ~ r i c a l evidence tocarry con- Vviction, and could only be, at best,erudite-guesswork. I neednot recal l the charges brought against the nature mythologists by their contemporaries, because although Max Muller,their chief representative, for a time had some influence onanthropological thought, it did not last, and Muller outlivedsuch influence as he had once had. Spencer and Tylor, thelatter strongly supported in this matter by his pupil AndrewLang, were hostile to nature-myth theories, and their advocacy of a different approach proved successful.

Herbert Spencer, from whom anthropology has t aken .some of its most important methodological < : o n c e p ~ s and Iwhom it has forgotten, devotes ala.fge"paI'tof- his ThePrinciples of Sociology! to a discussion of primitive beliefs, andthough his interpretation of them is similar to that of SirEdward Tylor and was published after Tylor 's PrimitiveCulture, his views were formulated long before his bookappeared, and were independently reachel. Primitive man,h e says, is. r a ! i ( ) I l ~ ' and, given his small knowledge, hisinferences are reasonable, if weak. He sees that such phenomena as sun and moon, clouds and stars, come and go, andthis gives him the of duality, of visible and invisibleconditions, and this notion is strengthened by other observa-tions, fo r example, of fossils, chick and egg, chrysalis and Ibutterfly, for Spencer had got it into his head that rudepeoples have no idea of natural explanation, as though theycould have conducted their various practical pursuits with-out it ! And if other things could be dualities, why not manhimself? His shadow and his reflection in water also comego. But it is ~ r e a m s ; which are real expe:iences to prin:l.i="r'uve peoples, which chIefly gave man the Idea of his own I'duality, and he identified the dream-self which wanders at ! (\n ight with the shadow-self wh ich appears by day. Thisidea of duality is fortified by experiences of various forms oftemporary insensibility, sleeping, swooning, catalepsy, andthe like, so that death itself comes to be thought of as onlya prolonged form of insensibility. Andif man has a double,

I Spencer, op. cit., vol. i.


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24 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 25

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a soul, by the same reasoning so must animals have one andalso plants and material objects./ The origin of religion, however, is to be looked for in the\. / belief.J:1 ~ o s t s \ ~ a t h e r t h a ~ i n soul$. That the soul has atemporary after-life is suggested by the appearance of thedead in dreams, so long as the dead are remembered; and

,,--the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is that1_ of a ghost. This concept ion must be earlier than that offetish, which implies the existence ofan indwelling ghost orspirit. Also, the idea of ghosts is found everywhere, unliket hat of fetishes, which is indeed not characteristic of veryprimitive peoples. The idea of ghosts inevitably-Spencer'sfavourite word-develops into t hat of gods, the ghosts ofremote ancestors or of superiQr persQns-becoming divinities(the doctrine of Euhemerism), and the food and drink placedon their graves to please the dead becoming sacrifices andlibations to the gods to propitiate them. So h ~ c o n c l u d e s that' a n ~ t Q r ..worshipjs the-root of every religion'X-_ ... -----------All this is served up in inappropriat e terrrisDorrowed from

I the physical sciences and in a decidedly didactic manner.The argument is a priori speculation, sprinkled with someillustrations, and is specious. It is a fine example of the intros ~ c t i o ~ i ~ p 8 C h o l o ~ or 'i f I were a horse ', fal laCy;-to-wluCl1I shall have to make frequent reference. If Spencerwere living in primitive conditions, those would, he assumed,have been the steps by which he would have reached thebeliefs which primitives hold. It does not seem to have occur red to h im to ask himsel f how, if the ideas of soul andghost arose from such fallacioliSreasoning about clouds andbutterflies and dreams and trances, the beliefs could havepersisted throughout millennia and could still be held bymillions of civilized people in his day and ours.Tylor 's theory (for which he owed a debt to Comte) of, animism he-eoined the word-is very similar to-th.at of/ -Spencer,-though, as the word anima implies, he stresses theidea of soul rather than ofgQ..9st. Some-ambigUity attaches-to- t h e ~ m ' a n i m i s m ' in anthropological writings, it beingsometimes employed in the sense of the belief, ascribed to--'Op. cit. i. 440. -

primitive peoples, that not only creatures but also inanimate /objects have life and personality, and sometimes with thefurther sense that in addition they have souls. Tylor's t ~ Q r y . _covers both senses, but we are particularly intereste


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26 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESdead o r to dreams among primitive peoples, and that thedifferences need to be accounted for if 'obvious inference' is tobe accepted as a valid causal conclusion.1

That the of soul led to that of spirit is a very dubioussupposition. Both ideas are present among what were calledthe lowest savages, who in evolutionary perspective were heldto be the nearest one could get to prehistoric man ; and thetwo conceptions are not only different but o p p o s ~ _ d , spiritbeing regarded as incorporeal, extraneous i O I D . ~ , and invasive. Indeed, Tylor, through failure to recognize a fundamentaldistinCtion between the two.conceptions, made aserious blunder iIi his represenfationofearlyHebraic thought,as Dr. Snaith has pointed out.2 Also, it remains to be provedthat the most primitive peoples think that creatures andmaterial objects have souls like their own. If any peoples canbe said to be dominantly animistic, in Tylor's sense of theword, they belong to much more advanced cultures, a factwhich, though it would have no historical significance for me,would be highly damaging to the evolutionary argument;as is also the fact that the conception oragod ISI0111'l..Q-amongall the so-called lowest hunters and collectors. Finally, wemay ask again how it is that, if religion is the product of soelementary an illusion, it has displayed so great a continuityand persistence.Tylor wished to show that primitive rel.!gio.g was rational,

t h a L i L a r o s e - f r o m o b s e r v a J : i ( ) ~ ~ , howevcr"lnadequate, andfrom logical deductions from them, howeyer faulty; t ha t i tconstituted a-crude natural philosophy.,In his treatment ofrn,ag% which he distinguished from religion rather for con-I ! 'venlence of exposition than on grounds of aetiology orvalidity, he likewise stressed the rational element in what hecalled 'this farrago of nonsense'. It also is based on genuineobservation, and rests further on classification of similarities,the first essential process in human knowledge. Where the magician goes wrong is injnferring that because things arealike they have a mystical link between them, thus mistaking

I J. R. Swanton, 'Three Factors in Primitive Religion', American Anthropolo-gist, N.S. xxvi (1924), 358-65.2 N. H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, 1944-, p. 148.

..

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 27an ideal connexion for a rea l one, a subjective one for a n ~ objective one. And i fwe ask how peoples who exploit natureand organize their social life so well make such mistakes, theanswer is that they have very good reasons for not perceivingthe futility of their magic. Nature, or trickeryon the part of themagician, often brings about what the magic is supposed toachieve; and ifit fails to achieve its purpose, that is rationallyexplained by neglect of some prescription, or by the factthat some prohibition has been ignored or some hostile forcehas impeded it. Also, there is plasticity about judgements ofsuccess and failure, and people everywhere find i t h ar d toappreciate evidence, especially when the weight of authorityinduces acceptance of what confirms, and rejection of whatcontradicts, a belie Here Tylor's observations are borne outby ethnological evidence.I have touched briefly on Tylor's discussions of magicpartly as a ~ Q 1 _ e _ r illustration of intellectualist i n t e r p r e t ~ t ! ( m ._and partly b e c ~ - i n e a : a s me--straigE:t to aiCestlmation of~ r < l : ~ e r ' ! contribution to our subJect. F l : ~ ~ E j , Isuppose, th';oest-known name in anthropology, and we owemuch to h im and to Spencer and Tylor. The whole of TheGolden Bough, a workof immense industry and erudition, is de-voted to prirp.itive superstitions. But it cannot be said that he ."added much ofvalue- toTylor's theory of religion; rather that . /he introduced some ~ 0 n f ' u s i o n into it in the form of two n e ~ fsuppositions, the one pseudo-historical and the otherpsychologicaL According to him, mankind everywhere, and sooneror later, passes through t 1 : l r . ~ e __~ t . . g ~ . L ( ) . f . i ! ! t e l l ~ _ c ! l l ( l . 1 develop- !ment, from magic to religion, and from religion to science, va scheme he may have taken over from Comte's--phases, thetheological, the metaphysical, and the posit ive,though thecorrespondence is far from an exact one. Other writers ofthe period, for example, King,]evons, and Lubbock, and, aswe shall see, in a certain way of viewing the matter, Marett,Preuss, and the writers of the Annie Sociologique school as well,also believed that magic preceded religion. Eventually, saysFrazer, the shrewder intelligences probably discovered thatIna-gic did not really achieve its ends, but, still being unableto overcome their difficulties by empirical means and to face


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28 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESI their crises through a refinedphilosophy, theyfellinto another, i llusion, that there were spiritual beings who could aid them.In course of time the shrewder intelligences saw that spiritswere equally bogus, an enlightenment which heralded thedawn of e x p ~ i m e n t a l science. The arguments in support ofthis thesis were, to say the least, trivial, and i twas ethnologically most vulnerable. In particular, the conclusions basedon Australian data were wide of the mark, and , since theAustralians were introduced into the argument to show thatthe s impler the cul ture, the more the magic and the less thereligion, it is pertinent to note that hunting and collectingpeoples, including many Australian tribes, h a v ~ aI.limisticand theistic beliefs and cults. It is also evident that thevariety, and therefore volume, of magic'in their cultures is, likely t o be less, as indeed it is, thanin cultures technologicallymore advanced: there cannot, for instance, be agriculturalmagic or magic of iron-working in the absence of cultivatedplants and ofmetals. No one accepts Frazer's theory of stagestoday.

The psychological part of his thesis was to oppose magicand science to rel igion, the first two postu lating a worldsubject to invariable natural laws, an idea he shared withJevons,r and the las t a world in which events depend on thecaprice of spirits. Consequently, while the magician andthe scientist, strangeJ.i!edfeliows, perform their operationswith quiet confidence:\the priest performs his in fear andtrembling. So psychologically science and magic are a l ike ._------,- -though one IiappelIS to be f ~ l s e and the other_t l ' l l ~ ~ J ' l l i s" ~ a n a l o g y - b e t w . . e ~ , ! L . s , ~ ~ e I l c ~ - a n d " m a g i c - ~ 6 t d S - 6 I l T y in so far as-both are techniques, and few anthropologists have regarded it/-as other than superficial. Frazer here made the same mistakein method as Levy-Bruhl was to make, in comparing modernscience with primitive magic instead of comparing empiricaland magical techniques in the same cultural conditions.However, not all that Frazer wrote about magic and reli

e - / / gion was chaff. There was some grain. For example, he wasable in his painstaking way to demonstrate what Condorcetand others had merely asserted, how frequently among the

I F. B. Jevons, 'Report on Greek Mythology', Folk-Lore, ii. 2 (r89r), 220 fr.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 29simpler peoples of the wm-Id rulers are m a g i c i ( l . n . L ~ n d Rriests. c/'Then, although he added f lttle to Tylor 's explanationofmagic as misapplication of association of ideas, he providedsome useful classificatory terms.. showing that these associations are of two types, those of similarity and those of contact,homoeopathic or imitative magic and contagious magic. Hedid not , however, go further than to show that in magicalbeliefs and rites we can discern certain elementary sensations.Neither Tylor nor Fraierexplainedwhy eople in theirmagicJiiusta e, as t ey supp'ose , l ea l conneXlOns or rea oneswhen they do Hot do so in tlieirother a c t l ~ t i e s . Moreover, it is- not toned that they do so. The error here was in not recog~ h a t the associations are SOCIal and not psychologltal "s t e r e o t y ~ [ C f " t J i ~ I E i ~ y O C c } 1 , ~ ~ t : l 1 e ~ ~ 1 9 r : ~ Q . . I ! , 1 L ~ h e n /;r n ~ s R e ~ l ~ c ritual s i t u C 1 ? ( ) ~ s ~ : ~ h i c h a r e a l ~ o ? f g ~ t ~ d l i ! " ~ ~ < ? ! . 1 - , /as I have-argued elsewliere.r " ,About ~ l l , . : t h ~ s e broadly speaking intellectualist,theoriss wemust say that, i f they cannot be refuted, they also canriot besustained, and for the simple reason that there is no evidenceabout how religious beliefs originated. The:,_eyo!utionarys t a g e s ~ j : h ~ i r sponsors attempted to c,onstruct, as a' means, of supplyln.g" the-missing 'eVidence, may have had logicalconsistency, but they ha d no historicalvalue. However, i fwe mus t discard the e ~ i 1 : (or rather' p ~ g ' ~ , s i Q n i s t )assumptions and judgements, or give them the s tatus ofrather vague hypotheses, we may still retain much of whatclaimed about the essential rationality of primitivepeoples.-They may not have reached their beliefs in themanner these Writers supposed, but even i f they did not, the

-element of rationality is still always there, in spite ofobserva---tions being inadequate, inferences faulty, and conclusionswrong. T l : l ~ J ~ _ e l i e f s _ a r . e ~ l w a ~ . o h e r e n t , and up to a pointthey can be critical and s c e p t l ~ d even experimental,within the system of their beliefs and i n its idiom; and theirthought is therefore intelligible to anyone who cares to learntheir language and study their way of life.The animistic theory in various fonns remained for many

I 'The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic', Bulletin of theFaculty of Arts, Egyptian University (Cairo), i, pt. 2 (r933), 282-3II


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30 PSYCHQLOGICAL THEORIESyears unchallenged, and i t left its mark on all the anthropological literature of the day, as, to give a single example,in Dorman's comprehensive account of the religion of theAmerican Indians, where every belief-totemism, sorcery,fetishism-is explained in animistic terms. But voices beganto be raised in protest, both wi th regard to the or igin ofreligion and to the order of its development.Before we consider what they had to say, it should beremarked that the critics had two advantages their predecessors lacked. Associationist psychology, which was more orless a mechanistic theory of sensation, was giving to experimental psychology, under the influenceofwhich anthropologists were able, though in a rather common-sense wayand in their everyday meanings , to make use of its terms,and we then hear less of the cognitive and JIlore of the affective and conative functions, the orectiveelements, of themind; of instincts, emotions, sentiments, and later, under theinfluence of psycho-analysis, of complexes, inhibitions, projection, &c.; and Gestalt psychology and the psychology ofcrowds were also to leave the ir mark. But what was more

----important was the great advance in ethnography in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century:' ana- early in the presentcentury. This provided the later writers with an abundanceof information and ofbetter quality: such researches as thoseof Fison, Howitt, and Spencer and Gillen for the Australianaboriginals; Tregear for theMaoris; Codrington,Haddon, andSeligman for the Melanesians; Nieuwenhuis, Kruijt, Wilken,Snuck Hurgronje, and Skeat and Blagden for the peoples 01Indonesia; Man for theAndaman Islanders; 1m Thurn andvon den Steinen for the Amerindians; Boasfor the Eskimoes;and in Africa Macdonald, Kidd, Mary Kingsley, Junod,Ellis, Dennet, and others. ______

It will have been noted that in one respect Frazer differedradically from Tylor, in claim that religion-was precededby a magical phase. Other writers took the same view. AnAmerican, John H. King, published in 1892 two volumesentitled The Supernatural: its Origin, Nature, and Evolution.They made little impression in the climate of animism thenprevailing, and had fallen into oblivion till resuscitated by

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 31Wilhelm Schmidt. As intellectualist and evolutionist asothers of the time, h e was of the opinion that the ideas ofghost and spirit are too sophisticated for rude men, a viewwhich follows logically from the basic assumption of theevolutionary thought of the time, that everything developsfrom something simpler and cruder. There must, he thought,be an earlier stage than animism, a mana stage in which theidea of luck,' of the canny and uncanny, was the sole constituent of what he called the supernal. This arose from faultydeductions from observations of physical states and organicprocesses, leading primitive man to suppose that the virtue,the mana, was in objects and events themselves as an intrinsic property of them. Hence arose the doctrine of spellsand charms, and the stage of magic came into being. Then,through errors of judgement and faulty reasoning aboutdreams and acquired neurotic states, arose the idea of ghosts,and finally, by a succession of steps, tha t of spirits and gods,the various stages depending upon a general development ofsocial institutions. So religion was for King a,ls2.aniUusion.Furthermore, it was a disaster which stayed infellectual andmoral progress; and primitive peoples who bel ieve suchfables are like small children, ontogenic development herecorresponding to phylogenic (what psychologists used to call.the doctrine of recapitulation).

That there must have been an earlier and cruder stage ofreligion than the animistic one was asserted by other writersbesides Frazer and King, Preuss in Germany and Marett inthis country being two of the best known of them, and theypresented a challenge to Tylor 's theory which had for somany years held the field; but in some cases the challengewas concerned only with the question of time and order ofdevelopment, and the critics in this matter fai led to provethat there has ever been such a stage of thought as they postulated. The most radical and damaging attack came f romtwo of Tylor's pupils, Andrew Lang and R. R . Marett.Likehis contemporaries,Andrew Langwas an evolutionary

,_ t h e o r i s ~ , b u t E ~ e : H , , ~ Q _ w : a z : a : : p : t i f i i t ~ ~ e , v - e l o p e d < ? ~ L ? I & h l ? ~ ! s 2; spirits.. He wrote W i : ~ d"sense-though with some nonsense also-but, partly because

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32 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESthe animistic origin of religion was so generally taken as evident, what he said about primitive religion was ignored till hewas later vindicated byWilhelm Schmidt. I t was alsobecausehe was a romanticman ofletterswho wrote on such subjects asPrince Charles Edward and Mary Stuart,. ~ G l . r , J ; d so could bedismissed as a litterateur and dilettante. He 'was an animist. ~ U } ~ ~ ~ e d ~ ~ ~ ! L I Y I Q L t h A L ~ ~ ~ _ e r i ; ~ o u l s ~ - u a n a - - s i . I o sequently in spirits,might have .. arisen from psychicalp ! J . ~ i i o m e n a ' .( d r e a ~ J . . t ~ ~ ~ J .: J i Y i ' _ h ~ : . \ i ? l s .ngt prepared toaccept tEat tIieiaea, of God arose as a late d e v e l o p m ~ p - t f : r - o : { l lJ h e n o H ? ~ s ~ - 6 ( s Q , u ! ~ ; g l l ~ s t s , a ~ ~ s p i r i ~ s ~ - H e - - p 6 l i i 6 ~ a out thattTleconception ofa creative, moral, fatherly, omnipotent, andomniscient God is found among the most primitive peoples ofthe globe, and is probably to be accounted for by what usedto be known as the argument from design, a rational conclusion by primitive man tha t the world around him musthave been made by some superior being. However this mightbe, on the evolutionists' own criteria, the idea of God, beingfound among the culturally simplest peoples, could no t be alate development from the ideas of ghost and soul or indeedanything else. Moreover, says Lang, the supreme being ofthese peoples is, at any rate inmanY'cases'llot thought of asspirit at all, at least in our sense of divine- s p i r i t - ~ ' G o d is aspirit, and' they who worship him must worship him in spiritand in truth'-bu t rather as what we might speak o(as somesort of person. Therefore he concludes that the conceptionof God 'need not be evolved out of reflections on dreams and"ghosts" '.1 The soul-ghost and God have totally differentsources, and monotheism r p ~ e v e n have p [ ~ ( ; e d e d animism,though the point of priority can never be historically settled;bu t in spite of this sensible assessment, Lang clearly thoughtthat monothe' was rior, and was corrupted and d e ~ a d e dater animistic ideas. e two s reams 0 re 'gIOuS t oughtfina y came together, the one throughHebrew and the otherthrough Hellenistic s es, in Christianity.Very different wa, - M ~ t . t . g n e : o f a r g u m e n j ~ He no t onlyadvocate _. e but allen ed onmethodological grounds the whole line of reasomng behm t e

I Lang, The Making ofReligion, p. 2. - -

--.,:

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 33explanation of religion that had been pu t forw . Primitive, alme , was not at all like the philosophermanque hehad beenmade out to be.With earlyman it is not ideas whichgive rise to action, but action which gives rise to ideas: 'savagereligion is something not so much thought out as dancedout.'I'It is the motor side to rimit iver .. which is si nifi-cant, not 1 re ectlVe side, and the act ion derives from a re-ctlve states. M a r e t n r r e w - f f i e ~ c o n c l u s i o n tllaCtneruore in"trie e a r u e s f ; - t 1 i e - 2 @ : . e ' : ~ ! l . i I X ! ~ 1 1 ; : f f i : ~ l i g i o n c ~ n o t : 1 5 e f u ~ ~ n l i a t e c c r r q . r n m a g i c , as it can be af a 'later stage whenmagl,c is conaemned By orgamzed religIOn. and acquires.ae thought it better,' when s p e a E l i g ~ o rprlID1tive peoples, to use the expression 'magico-religious',a usage, and in my opinion an unfortunate one, adopted bya number of anthropologists, among them Rivers and Seligman. However, Marett himself preferred to speak of b O ~ l las mana, a Melanesian word anthropologists had adopted_into their conceptual vocabulary with, I believe, disastrousresults, for, though we cannot discuss so complicated a matter now, it seems clear that mana d id not mean to thoseto whose languages the word belonged, the impersonal force- a n almost metaphysical conception-which Marett andothers, for example, King, Preuss, Durkheim, and Huber tand Mauss, following the information they then had, thoughtit did. According to Marett, primitive peoples have a feelingthat there is an occult power in certain persons and things,and it is the presence or absence of this feeling which cutsoff the sacred from the profane, the wonderworld from theworkaday world, it being the function of taboos to separatethe one worldfrom the other; and this feeling is the emotion

__ of awe, a compound of fear, wonder, admiration, interest,respect, perhaps even love. Whatever evokes this emotion .and is t reated as a mystery, is religion. Why some thingsshould evoke this response and no t others, and why amongsome peoples and not among others, Marett does no t tell us:indeed, his illustrative examples are sparse, and thrown intothe argument quite haphazardly.

Though he says that magic cannot at this stage be differI R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, 2nd edit. (1914), p. xxxi.

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34 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESentiated from religion, he nevertheless offers :a differentexplanation ofmagic, though of the same emotionalist order.-.. Magic arises out of emotional tension. A 1TIan is overcome byhate or love or some other emotion, and,since there is nothingpractical he can do about i t, he resorts to make-believe torelieve the tension, as a man might throw into the fire theportrait of his faithless mistress. This is wljat Marett callsrudimentary magic (Vierkandt reasons in the same way) .'When such situations are sufficiently recurrent, the responsebecomes stabilized as what he calls developed magic, asocially recognized mode of customary behaviour. Then themagician is well aware of the difference between symbol andrealization. He knows that he is not doing the real thing, thatpoint ing a spear at an enemy at a distance while recitingincantations against him is not the s a . m ~ as throwing a spearat him at close range. He does not, as'J:ylor made out, mistake an ideal connexion-for a real one; and-hence also thereis no true analogy, as F r a z e ~ h e l d , betweenma .c andor the savage IS well aware 0 t e ~ n c e be..Lw..e.en magigl__a , n a m ~ . h ~ a u s a a o n ~ b e t w e e n ~ Y ~ ~ 1 i ~ and e ~ ~ i c a laction. So magic I s a : s t r 1 ? g i t u t e . . . a . c . 1 i ~ t u a t i o n s in whfcp.-practiCal n ; e a - n s , ) o . ~ t f a t i ~ p . d are fac g, and its functioJl. i t h ~ ~ t i c or. s t i m : . l ! l a t i l i ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ [ . , . . ~ e ~ - courage, r e l j . ~ f ,hope , tenaCl . In his artlcle on magIc il l"Ifastmg"'S Encyclopae za 0 Religion and Ethics Marett gives a somewhat different,though also a cathart ic , explanation of certain forms ofmagical expression. I Recurrent situations in the social lifegenerate states of emotional intensity which, i f they cannotfind a vent in act iv ity directed to a pract ical end, such ashunting, fighting, and love-making, have to be exhausted insecondary, or substitute, activity, such as dances which playat hunting, fighting, and love-making; but here the functionof the substitute activity is to serve as an outlet for superfluous energy. Then these substitute activities change frombeing surrogates to become auxiliaries to empirical action,retaining their 'mimetic form, though in reality they arerepercussions rather than imitations.As compared with his contribut ion towards an under

I Marett, Hasting's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 1915, vol. viii.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 35standing of magic, Marett had little of positive significanceto say about primitive religion. Therewas, indeed, much talkabout the 'sacred', in which, I suspect, he owed a good dealto Durkheim, but it amounted to l it tle more than jugglingwith words. Maybe he found himself, as a Fellowof an Oxfordcollege at that time, in an equivocal position; and, beinga philosopher, he was able to (appear to) ge t out of it bydistinguishing between the task of social anthropology todetermine the origin of religion-a mixture of history andcausation-and the task of theology, which was concernedwith its validi ty;1 a posi tion we all to some extent take up.His conclusion is that ~ T h e end and result . . . .glOn IS, 1 wor, e c ecratlOn of life, ! h u t i . ~ a t i Q 1 ! of t ~ w c t o ~ - - -~ r i t e r , but this genial and ebullientclassical philosopher, who by a single short paper establishedhimself as the leader of the pre-animistic school, did not setf o ~ ! J : l _ J h e _ w e i g h 1 : of evidence reguiresLto supporthistheories,and neither his influence nor his reputation lasted long. Norwas it enough, though what he said was amusing and thereis an element of t ru th in it, to say (in ~ o n v e r s a t i o n ) that tounderstand primitive mentality there was no need to go andlive among savages, the experience o fan Oxford CommonRoom being sufficient.I speakvery briefly of the writings, which were prolific, ofanother classical scholar, a school headmaster, Ernest C r ~ Y " : :.J::y,.whose books were appearing at much the same time asMarett's. He exercised much good sense in knocking downsome erroneous theories still current at the time, such as thoseof group marriage, primitive communism, and marriage bycapture, but his positive contributions were less valuable. Indiscussing religion in The Idea of the Soul he followed Tylor insupposing that the conception of spirit arose from that of_~ o u l and in a later s tage of culture became that of God,buthe disagreed with him about the genesis of the idea of soul.

I Marett, 'Origin and Validity in Religion' (first pub. in 1916) and 'Magicor Religion?' (first pub. in 1919), Psychology and Folk-Lore (1920). Cf. alsoarticle cited in next note.

:I 'Religion (Primitive Religion)', ETlC)I. Brit., lIth edit., xix. 105.


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36 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESTylor's view on this question, so Crawley said, took us nofurther than Hobbes or Aristotle, and it is psychologicallyimpossiblefor the idea of soul to have originated from dreams,&c. Rather, it arose from sensation. Primitive man couldvisualize any person he knew when that person was absent,and from this duality arose the ideas of soul and ghost; andit follows that everything of which a menta l image can beformed can have a soul, though the souls of inanimate objects are not thought, any more than the objects themselves,to be animated, as Tylor believed. So 'Spiritual existence ismental existence; the world of spirits is the mental world'.1As for God or gods, they are no more than aggregates'ofghosts or ghosts of prominent individuals, which is whatSpencer had said. Religion is thus an illusion.If this were all Crawleywrote about religion,he could havebeen placed in the intellectualist class, and what generalcomments have been made about that class would apply tohim also. But in other of his writings, including his earlierand best-known work The Mystic Rose, which I, like some ofhis contemporaries, find rather unintelligible, he appears tohave a more general theory of religion. Primitive man'swhole mental habit is religious or superstitious, and magicis therefore no t to be distinguished from religion. In hisignorance he lives in a world ofmystery in which he does notdistinguish between subjective and objective reality; and thedrive behind all his thought is fear, especially of the dangerin social relations, and particularly those between men andwomen. This feeling is partly instinctive and partly due to amore or less subconscious idea that properties and qualities,being infectious, can be transmitted through contact. Therefore men feel themselves to be particularly vulnerable whenengaged in physiological actions such as eating and sexualcongress, and tha t is why these actions are hedged roundwith taboos. He concludes that 'All living religious conceptions spring fro:m more or less constant functional origins,physiological and psychological'.2 He even speaks of 'physiological thought',3 theprocess offunctionsproducing, byamore

I A. E. Crawley, The Idea of the Soul, 1909, p. 78.,. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1927 edit., i. 86.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 37'or less organic reflex, ideas concerning them. In this theoryprimitive religion amounts practtc:illy.!o.taboo, the productof fear; thespirits in which primitive peoples believe beingno more than cOllC;eptualizations of danger and fear. I findit difficult to recondle this pos it ion with the s tatement inThe Idea of the Soul that the s o u ~ a s i s of all religion' Ibut, as I havesaid, I do not f i n d ~ a very lucid writer.His general th is the same in all his books:re , ' . , su::tlmateJ,yonly a producto pnmluve man's fear,a ~ d e 2 c ~ J . 2 5 : k . o ~ i n i t i a t j y e ~ d :;.f ~ ~ E . ~ n c e and mexl?,enence; and It IS not a thmg m Itse f, a department ofsociaIlife, but rather a tone or spirit which permeates everypart of it and is chiefly concerned with the fundamentalprocesses of organic life and climacteric events. . T h ~ ..Yi.taLinstinc he will to live, is identical with reli 'ous fedin . ReliglOn makes sacred w a promo es e, ealth,-and-strength.When we ask what the religious emotion is, we are told thatit is nothing specific, 'but that tone or quality of any feelingwhich results in making something sacred'.2 It follows fromCrawley's argument, as he himself says, thaf the greaterthe dangers, the more the rel igion, and ,therefore the moreprimitive stages of culture are more religious than the laterones, and women are more religious than men; and also,that God is a product of psycho-biological processes.Before commenting on Marett's and Crawley's explanations of religion and magic, let us consider a few furthersimilar examples.I suppose a few words should be said here about WilhelmWundt, an influential figure of the time, though now seldomreferred to. An eclectic writer, he is not easy to place. HisV61kerpsychologie approach undoubtedly influenced Durkheim, bu t in the main it can be said that his explanationswere psychological, as well as being highly evolutionary, andalso speculative and somewhat tedious. Ideas which refer to -what is no t directly amenable to perception, mythologicalthinking as he calls it, originate in emotional processes(chiefly fear-Scheu), 'which are projected outward into the

I Crawley, The Idea of the Soul, 1909, p, I.,. Id., The Tree ofLife, 1905, p. 209.

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38 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIESenvironment'.1 First comes belief in magic and demons, andit is not till the next evolutionary stage, the Totemic Age,that we have the beginnings of religion proper in the worship of animals. Then, as totemism fades, the totem-ancestorof the clan is replaced by. the human ancestor as the object ofworship. Ancestor worship then issues in hero cult, and thenin the cult of the gods-the Age of Heroes and Gods. Thefinal stage is the Humanistic Age with its religious universalism. Perhaps all this should be labelled philosophy ofhistory rather than as anthropology. Certainly it reads veryoddly to the anthropologist of today.We have now reached the e ra o f field-working anthropologists, who had studied native peoples at first hand, andnot in accounts written by other, and untrained, observers.R. H.!:-owie,whose study of the Crow Indians was an important coniribution to anthropology, tells us that primitivereligion is characterized by 'a sense of the Extraordinary,Mysterious, or Supernatural'2 (note the capital letters), andthe religious response is that of 'amazement and awe; andits source is in the Supernatural, Extraordinary, Weird,Sacred, Holy, Divine'3 (again, note the capital letters). Like

/Crawley, he held that there is no specifically religious be.haviour, only religious feelings, so the belief of the CrowIndians in the existence of ghosts of the dead is not religiousbelief, because the subject is of no emotionalinterest to them;and so the militant atheist and the priest can both be religious persons, i f they experience the same feelings, andChristian dogma and the theory of biological evolution mayboth be religious doctrines. Positivism, egalitarianism, absolutism, and the cult of reasonl are all likewise indistinguishable from religion; and one's country's flag is a typical_religious symbol. When magic is associated with emotion, if "also is religion. Otherwise it is psychologically equivalent toour science, as Frazer said. -Paul Radin, another American, whose study of the Winnebago Indianswas also noteworthy, took up much the same

I w. Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology, 1916, p. 74.2 R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion, 1925, p. xvi.3 Ibid., p. 322 .

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES 39position. There is no specific religious behaviour, only a religious feeling, a more than normal sensitiveness to certainbeliefs and customs, 'which manifests itself in a thrill, afeeling of exhilaration, exaltation and awe and in a completeabsorption in internal sensations'.1 Almost any belief canbecome associated with this religious feeling, though it isparticularly associated with values of success, happiness,and long life (one catches the echo of William james's'religion of healthy-mindedness'); and the religious thrill isparticularly evident in the Grises of life, such as puberty anddeath. When what is generally regarded as magic arousesthe religious emotion, it is religion. Otherwise it is folklore.

To cite a final American anthropologist, and a brilliantone, Goldenweiser: he also says that the two realms of thesupernatural, magic and religion, are both characterized bythe 'religious thrill'.2 -}As a field worker,{lfilinowSkIIhas put anthropologistsfor all time in his debt, l 5 U i l l ! . h ! s _ ~ : J : ! : R ! i j : ! ! ! y theoretis:alwritings he d i s p l a y ~ 4 . ~ l i t ! l . e . ~ Q r t g m ~ l j t r __ or distinctiQll oft l i O i I g l i l ' : ' D i : f f e r e r i t i a t i n ~ J _ ' ! . . . Q t h e r sdid, between the ~ e q > (:md". the. profane, l i e - ~ c l a i I l l e d that"what distinfl!:ished tm;sacredwas--tliafiis"actSwere"Carr1ed out with r ~ v e r e n c e andawe..Where m a g c r r ~ t 1 ' f Q m J ; i i g i O i l I S ' t h a t religious rites '.l r n : v e : i i O ~ r p u r p o s e , the objective being attained m the r i t e s : : t h e 1 l l s ~ e s , as m natal , puber ty, and mortuary c g e ~ i" lT l f f . , lC t e en IS m to

....attained-6f11ie rites, ut"not nu t h e D : ! ; ~ ~ ~ ~ . L f u r c u l ~!ymg. ~ c h o l o g i c a ~ ? : - v e v e r , they are a ~ ~ ~ . ' ~ __f O r ~ ~ Q n of bot IS at artiq. Faceawiltlll:fe'SCnses,"ancrespeCia'tty-t , men in their fear and anxietyrelease their tensions and overcome their despair by thep ~ r : f i ? r m a n c e of religious rites. Malinowski's discussion ofmagic in his later writings3follows so closely part of Marett's-- - - . _.

I P. Radin, Social Anthropology, 1932, p. 244.2 Goldenweiser, Early Civilization, 1921, p. 346.3 Malinowski, 'Magic, Scienceand Religion', Science, Religion and Reality, 1925.In an earlier essay, 'Th

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