Part 10

But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement and variety: the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening, night and day—these were there as well as here. Animals were essential to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo who holds the soul to be the “owner” of the body: the body, the flesh, dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its “owner.”

Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to accompany him on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic boy had only the dog and his journey was longer; but to some grieving fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls?

The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion en masse. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis and “Clothilde’s God,” and it doubtless happened frequently before the dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go before and announce the coming of the dead; Vedic animals kept their forms, the renewed body was perfect and incorruptible, but it was the real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at the man’s funeral will be useful to him in the after-life. However derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full.

Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in Norway, in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox, and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges with elaborately carved animals’ heads. It was a queen’s grave; her distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the place of a provision full of meaning for real wants.

So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never killed in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely transferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit.

After animals were domesticated they were not killed at all for a long time—still less were they eaten. Of this there can be no shadow of doubt. The first domestic animals were far too valuable possessions for any one to think of killing them. As soon would a showman kill a performing bull which had cost him a great deal of trouble to train. Besides this, and more than this, the natural man, who is much better than he is painted, has a natural horror of slaying the creature that eats out of his hand and gives him milk and wool and willing service.

There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk, cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill, it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archæological Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and the knife—the guilty thing—was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last custom is important; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic animals, even for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The case stands thus: at first they were not killed at all; then, for a long time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher utters before killing an animal.

Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not two. The people who sacrificed domestic animals to accompany their dead generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose, and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give them these as companions in another world.

I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is unlikely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not cannibals.

On the other hand, cannibalism is closely connected with Pact Sacrifice, which there is a tendency now to regard as antecedent to Gift Sacrifice, especially among those scholars who think that the whole human race has passed through a stage of Totemism. Psychologically the Totemist’s sacrifice of a reserved animal to which all the sanctity of human life is ascribed, resembles the sacrifice by some African tribes of a human victim—as in both cases not only is a pact of brotherhood sealed, but also those who partake of the flesh are supposed to acquire the physical, moral, or supersensual qualities attributed to the victim. Indeed, it would be possible to argue that the Totem was a substitute for a human victim, and a whole new theory of Totemism might be evolved from that postulate, but it is wiser to observe such affinities without trying to derive one thing from another which commonly proves a snare and a delusion. It is sufficient to note that among fundamental human ideas is the belief that man grows like what he feeds upon.

The sacrifice of the Totem, though found scattered wherever Totemism prevails, is not an invariable or even a usual accompaniment of it. When it does occur, the Totem is not supposed to die, any more than the victim was supposed to die in the primitive Gift Sacrifice. It changes houses or goes to live with “our lost others,” or returns to eternal life in the “lake of the dead.” The death of the soul is the last thing that is thought of. The majority of Totemists do not kill their Totems under any circumstances, and when the Totem is a wild beast they believe that it shows a like respect for the members of its phratry. If one dies they deplore its loss; in some parts of East Africa where the Totem is a hyena not even the chief is mourned for with equal ceremony.

Totemism is the adoption of an animal (or plant) as the visible badge of an invisible bond. The word Totem is an American Indian word for “badge,” and the word Taboo a Polynesian term meaning an interdiction. The Totemist generally says that he is descended from his Totem: hence the men and the beasts of each Totem clan are brothers. But the beast is something more than a brother, he is the perpetual reincarnation of the race-spirit. Numerical problems never trouble the natural human mind; all the cats of Bubastis were equally sacred, and all the crows of Australia are equally sacred to the clans who have a crow for Totem. To the mass of country folks every cow is the cow, every mouse is the mouse; the English villager is practically as much convinced of this as the American Indian or the Australian native is convinced that every Totem is the Totem.

Men and women of the same Totem are taboo: they cannot intermarry. But I need not speak of Totemism here as a social institution. My business with it is limited to its place in the history of ideas about animals.

In Totemism we find represented not one idea, but an aggregation of most of the fundamental ideas of mankind. This is why the attempt to trace it to one particular root has failed to dispose of the question of its origin in a final and satisfactory manner. For a time there seemed to be a general disposition to accept what is called the “Nickname theory” by which Totemism was attributed to the custom of giving animal nicknames. We have a peasant called Nedrott (in the Brescian dialect “duck”); I myself never heard his real name—his wife is “la Nedrott” and his children are “i Nedrotti.” It is alleged that his father or grandfather had flat feet. But I never heard of a confusion between the Nedrotti and their nicknamesakes. It may be said that this would be sure to happen were they less civilised. How can we be sure that it would be sure to happen? An eminent scholar who objects to the nickname theory on the ground that it assigns too much importance to “verbal misunderstanding,” proposes as an alternative the “impregnation theory.” A woman, on becoming aware of approaching motherhood, mentally connects the future offspring with an animal or plant which happens to catch her eye at that moment. This is conceivable, given the peculiar notions of some savages on generation, but if all Totemism sprang from such a cause, is it not strange that in Australia there are only two Totems, the eagle-hawk and crow?

As a mere outward fact, the Totem is what its name implies, a badge or sign; just as the wolf was the badge of Rome, or as the lion is taken to represent the British Empire. The convenience of adopting a common badge or sign may have appeared to men almost as soon as they settled into separate clans or communities. Besides public Totems there exist private and secret Totems, and this suggests that the earliest communities may have consisted of a sort of freemasonry, a league of mutual help of the nature of a secret society. Around the outward and so to speak heraldic fact of Totemism are gathered the impressions and beliefs which make it a rule of life, a morality and a religion.

The time may come when the desire to give a reason for an emotion will be recognised as one of the greatest factors in myth-making. The Totemist thinks that he spares his Totem because it is his Totem. But man is glad to find an excuse for sparing something. Altruism is as old as the day when the first bird took a succulent berry to its mate or young ones instead of eating it. Where men see no difference between themselves and animals, what more natural than that they should wish to spare them? When it was found difficult or impossible to spare all, it was a katharsis of the wider sentiment to spare one, and Totemism gave a very good excuse. It appealed to a universal instinct. This is not the same as to say that it had its origin in keeping pets; it would be nearer the truth to describe the love of pets as a later birth of the same instinctive tendency which the Totemist follows when he cherishes and preserves his Totem.

The primitive man is a child in the vast zoological garden of Nature; a child with a heart full of love, curiosity and respect, anxious to make friends with the lion which looks so very kind and the white bear who must want some one to comfort him. The whole folk-lore of the world bears witness to this temper, even leaving Totemism out of the question.

The Bechuanas make excuses to the lion before killing him, the Malays to the tiger, the Red Indians to the bear—he says that his children are hungry and need food—would the bear kindly not object to be killed? Some writers see Totemism in all this, and so it may be, but there is something in it deeper than even Totemism—there is human nature.

Take the robin—has any one said it was a Totem? Yet Mrs. Somerville declared she would as soon eat a child as a robin, a thoroughly Totemist sentiment. A whole body of protective superstition has crystallised around certain creatures which, because of their confiding nature, their charming ways, their welcome appearance at particular seasons, inspired man with an unusually strong impulse to spare them. I was interested to find the stork as sacred to the Arabs in Tunis and Algeria as he is to his German friends in the North. A Frenchman remarked that “sacred birds are never good to eat,” but he might have remembered the goose and hen of the ancient Bretons which Cæsar tells us were kept “for pleasure” but never killed; not to speak of the pigeons of Moscow and of Mecca.

It should be observed how quickly the spared or cherished bird or beast becomes “lucky.” In Germany and Scandinavia it is lucky to have a stork’s nest on the roof. The regimental goat is the “luck of his company.”

M. S. Reinach’s opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of the domestication of animals offers an attractive solution to that great problem, but it has not been, nor do I think that it will ever be, generally accepted. It, is however, plain, that where population is sparse, and dogs and guns undreamt of, wild animals would be far less wild than in countries with all the advantages of civilisation; the tameness of birds on lonely islands when the explorer first makes his descent is a case in point. No doubt, therefore, with the encouragement they received, the animal Totems acquired a considerable degree of tameness, but from that to domestication there is a long step. Our household “Totem,” the robin, is relatively tame; he will even eat crumbs on the breakfast-table, but he flies away in springtime and we see him no more.

Besides being a social institution and a friendly bond between man and beast, Totemism is an attempt to explain the universe. Its spiritual vitality depends on the widely rooted belief in archetypes; the things seen are the mirror of the things unseen, the material is unreal, the immaterial the only reality. We are ourselves but cages of immortal birds. The real “I” is somewhere else; it may be in a fish, as in the Indian folk-tale, or it may be in a god. I do not know, by the by, if it has been remarked that a man can be a Totem: the incarnation of the indwelling race-spirit. The Emperor of Japan corresponds exactly to this description. The deified Cæsar was a Totem. A god can be a Totem: among the Hidery (islanders of the North Pacific whose interesting legends were published by the Chicago Folk-lore Association) the raven, which is their Totem, is the manifestation of the god Ne-kilst-lass who created the world. Here Totemism approaches till it touches Egyptian zoomorphism. Was this form an earlier or a later development than that in which the Totem is merely an ancestor? Our inability to reply shows our real want of certainty as to whether Totemism is a body of belief in a state of becoming or in a state of dissolution.

Photo: Egypt Exploration Fund. HATHOR COW. Cairo Museum. (Found in 1906 by Dr. E. Naville at Deir-el-bahari.)]

We do know that Egyptian zoomorphism is not old, at least in the exaggerated shape it assumed in the worship of the bull Apis. It is a cult which owed its success to the animistic tendency of the human mind, but its particular cause is to be looked for in crystallised figurative language. The stupendous marble tombs of the sacred bulls that seem to overpower us in the semi-obscurity of the Serapeum remind one of how easy it is to draw false conclusions relative to the past if we possess only half-lights upon it: had Egyptian hieroglyphics never yielded up their secret we might have judged the faith of Egypt to have been the most material, instead of one of the most spiritual of religions.

In Egyptian (as in Assyrian) cosmogony the visible universe is the direct creation of God. “The god who is immanent in all things is the creator of every animal: under his name of Ram, of the sheep, Bull, of the cows: he loves the scorpion in his hole, he is the god of the crocodile who plunges in the water: he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmee is an image, Ra is an image: HE alone maketh himself in millions of ways.” Amon Ra is described in another grand hymn as the maker of the grass for the cattle, of fruitful trees for men yet unborn; causing the fish to live in the river, the birds to fill the air, giving breath to those in the egg, giving food to the bird that perches, to the creeping thing and to the flying thing alike, providing food for the rats in their holes, feeding the flying things in every tree. “Hail to thee, say all creatures. Hail to thee for all these things: the One, Alone with many hands, awake while all men sleep, to seek out the good of all creatures, “Amon Sustainer of all!” This is, indeed, a majestic psalm of universal life.

Contrary to what was long the impression, the Wheel of Being was not an Egyptian doctrine, but the dead, or rather some of them, were believed to have the power of transforming themselves into animals for limited periods. It was a valued privilege of the virtuous dead: the form of a heron, a hawk or a swallow was a convenient travelling dress. Four-footed beasts were reserved to gods.

There was no prejudice against sport if carried on with due regard to vested sacred rights. The first hunting-dog whose name we know was Behkaa, who was buried with his master, his name being inscribed over his picture on the tomb. The injury of animals sacred to the gods was, of course, a grave sin. Among the protests of innocence of a departing soul we read: “I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts; I have not hunted wild animals in their pasturages; I have not netted the sacred birds; I have not turned away the cattle of the gods; I have not stood between a god and his manifestation.”

The Egyptian mind, which was essentially religious, saw the “god who is immanent in all things” yet standing outside these things to sustain them with a guiding providence; the highly trained Chinese mind, with its philosophic trend, saw the divine indivisible intelligence without volition illuminating all that lived: “The mind of man and the mind of trees, birds and beasts, is just the one mind of heaven and earth, only brighter or duller by reflection: as light looks brighter when it falls on a mirror than when it falls on a dark surface, so divine reason is less bright in cow or sheep than in man.” This fine definition was given by Choo-Foo-Tsze, the great exponent of Confucianism, who, when he was four years old, surprised his father by asking, on being told that the sky was heaven, “What is above it?” Choo-Foo-Tsze in the thirteenth century anticipated some modern conclusions of geology by remarking that since sea shells were found on lofty mountains as if generated in the middle of stones, it was plain “that what was below became lifted up, what was soft became hard”; it was a deep subject, he said, and ought to be investigated. Long before the Nolan, Confucius had conceived the idea of the great Monad: “one God who contains and comprehends the whole world.” It was an idea entirely incomprehensible to all but a few educated men in any age. Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism left the Chinese masses what they found them—a people whose folk-lore was their religion. Were they asked to believe in the Wheel of Being? They made that folk-lore too. Dr. Giles tells the folk-tale of a certain gentleman who, having taken a very high degree, enjoyed the privilege (which is admitted to be uncommon) of recollecting what happened between his last death and birth. After he died, he was cited before a Judge of Purgatory and his attention was attracted by a quantity of skins of sheep, dogs, oxen, horses, which were hanging in a row. These were waiting for the souls which might be condemned to wear them; when one was wanted, it was taken down and the man’s own skin was stripped off and the other put on. This gentleman was condemned to be a sheep; the attendant demons helped him on with his sheep-skin when the Recording Officer suddenly mentioned that he had once saved a man’s life. The Judge, after looking at his books, ruled that such an act balanced all his misdoings: then the demons set to work to pull off the sheep-skin bit by bit, which gave the poor gentleman dreadful pain, but at last it was all got off except one little piece which was still sticking to him when he was born again as a man.