(b) That whatever seems to move or act spontaneously, like the winds and streams and echoes, the sun, moon, planets, and shooting stars, should be felt as a spiritual agency; especially if it cry out with empathetic reverberation, as winds and cataracts do, trees tormented by the storm, waves, fire, and the ice-floe when it breaks up in spring; or if it excite fear by being extraordinary and dangerous, as thunder and lightning are, whirlwinds and whirlpools, waterspouts and volcanoes. Dr. Speisser writes that at Ambrym, when the volcano is active, the natives climb to the top and bring sacrifices to appease it, throwing coco-nuts and yams into the crater.[171]
(c) That whatever has been regarded as having magical force should be treated—after the rise of the ghost-theory (supposing this to be of later origin) has given vogue to a new principle of explanation—as owing its virtue to a spirit, either by immanence or possession (two modes of actuation which may or may not be distinguished), and so become a fetich, instead of being merely an amulet or talisman.
(d) That whatever is much used in ritual, especially if often addressed in spells or incantations, should become an object of reverence, apt to be personified and raised to, or even above, the human level as a conscious agent: for example, padi and rice in Indonesia, the ordeal tree on the Congo, already mentioned. Fire-sticks used in the ritual of sacrifice are often deified. In India, the conch, having for ages been used in religious rites, “the people gradually came to revere the instrument itself and to adore and invoke it.”[172] “A strange religious feature [of the Rigveda] pointing to a remote antiquity is the occasional deification and worship even of objects fashioned by the hand of man, when regarded as useful to him. These are chiefly sacrificial implements.”[173] The practice now extends in India to nearly every tool and utensil. Amongst the very few inanimate gods of the Cherokees are the Stone, invoked by the Shaman when seeking lost goods by means of a pebble suspended by a string; and the Flint, invoked when about to scarify a patient with an arrow-head before rubbing in medicine.[174] By the Apache, heddontin (pollen of the cat-tail rush) is used as the sacrificial powder in nearly all rites, and is personified and prayed to.[175] When spells are addressed to any object, the analogy of address to human beings tends to cause that object to be thought of as humanly conscious.
(e) Stocks and stones have been worshipped, as the dwelling-place of spirits in many parts of the world; having superseded in the mind of their devotees the ghost of the men whose burial-place they formerly marked, but who themselves have been forgotten; and probably, on the analogy of these stones, others that no ghost ever haunted.
(f) Where Animism is active amongst a timid and suspicious people, whatever injures a man is believed to act of malice: as amongst the Indians of Guiana, who are so timid that rather than go hunting alone they will take a woman or a child along with them.[176]
Under such conditions as these a sort of acquired psychological Animism is very widely though very irregularly diffused; but were it universal and uniform, it could not of itself account for hyperphysical Animism—the doctrine that men (or some men), some animals, plants, things, places, are possessed or informed by spirits that are capable of separate existence.
§ 3. The Ghost Theory
Hyperphysical Animism may be easiest understood as having arisen with the belief in human ghosts. The causes of this belief have been fully set forth by Herbert Spencer[177] and Sir E. B. Tylor[178] in a way that to my mind is convincing. Amongst those causes dreams predominate; wherein the dead are met again as in the flesh. The living body having always been for the savage a conscious force-thing, at death the conscious force leaves the thing or corpse. This might be accepted by him as a fact of the same kind as the loss of its virtue by a talisman or amulet (which is known sometimes to happen), were it not for dreams in which the dead still live. That this conscious force that has left the body is not visible except in dreams need excite little wonder, since many forces natural and magical are invisible.
A dream not being common to two men at the same time, the things that are seen in it cannot be pointed out, nor therefore directly named (in this resembling subjective experiences). It was for ages impossible to narrate a dream as a dream: there was no way of distinguishing it from external events, either for the dreamer himself or (were that possible) in reporting it to another. He was far away and met his father, yet had lain by the fire all night! Hence to find names with which to describe such things men turned to other ways in which they seemed to have a double existence, to shadows and reflections: which in their sudden appearance and disappearance, and sometimes faint, sometimes distorted outlines, bear some resemblance to dream-images; and probably it is felt to be significant that shadows and reflections disappear at night, just when dreams occur. Shadows and reflections are not necessarily identified with the ghost derived from the dream-image, because their names are given to it; but sometimes they certainly are; so that a man who, on looking into water, happens not to see his reflection may believe that his spirit has gone away, and that he himself must be ill, and accordingly he becomes ill; or if at noon near the equator he notices that he has no shadow, he may think his soul is gone, and run to a medicine-man to get it back; and dead bodies may be believed to have no shadows.[179] Inasmuch as a body even lying on the ground casts a shadow, except at tropical noon, the belief that it does not do so at any time implies an acquired inability to see what is before one’s eyes; as sometimes happens in hypnosis and other conditions of negative hallucination.
The idea of a separable conscious personal force, or spirit, that leaves the body at death, serves also, as it gathers strength, to explain sleep, fainting, epilepsy; and sometimes every sickness is attributed to the partial detachment or desertion of the spirit; which, therefore, it is the doctor’s business to plug in, or to catch and restore; or (if I rightly remember a report of Miss Kingsley’s) he may even supply another one from a basketful of souls kept at hand for such exigencies.