The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

§ 7. Spirits are controlled by Magic

The savage imagination having created out of dreams and other strange experiences a world of invisible and powerful beings who may be friendly or hostile,—so human that they must be accessible to prayers, but often turn a deaf ear to them—must desire sacrifices, yet often reject them—capricious and inscrutable—it became necessary, in order to restore confidence in all the relations of life, that their caprice should somehow be overcome; and to accomplish this three ways were open: first, to increase the prayers and sacrifices until their importunity and costliness should prove irresistible—and this way led to all the magnificence and to all the horrors of religious rites; secondly, to work upon the fears or vulnerability of spirits by beating, starving, slaying, banishing or degrading them; or, thirdly, to constrain them, as men are often constrained, by magical rites and formulæ. From the beginning this necessity is felt.

The constraint of spirits by fear or violence is characteristic of Fetichism. The wizards of the Congo catch spirits in traps; or drive them into animals, which they behead; or spear them in some dark corner, and then exhibit their blood upon the spear-head. Passing from the Congo through many ages of progress, we arrive in China, and find that in time of drought, if the city-god neglects to put an end to it, he is first of all entreated; but that failing, his idol is stripped naked and put to stand in the sun; or an iron chain is hung round his neck—the mark of a criminal—till rain falls; or he may be dethroned altogether.[325] With such crude practices, however, we are not now concerned.

The control of spirits by Magic, especially by spells—or by other spirits who, in turn, are controlled by spells—is in its earlier form characteristic of Shamanism: indeed, it is the essence of Shamanism; though, of course, in many shamanistic tribes, having intercourse with peoples of different culture, other beliefs, ascribing independent or even superior power to spirits, are often found. Spirits may be so completely subdued by spells as to excite little fear. Among the Yurats and Ostyaks, the shamans treat their spirits without ceremony, and even buy and sell them.[326] So do the Esquimo angekoqs. In Greenland, “all phenomena are controlled by spirits, and these spirits are controlled by formulæ or charms, which are mainly in possession of the medicine-men, although certain simple charms may be owned and used by any one.” Hence, “nothing like prayer or worship is possible”;[327] for why supplicate spirits whom you can command? “The rule of man—not of all men, but of one specially gifted (the shaman), over Nature, or over the superior beings who direct her, is the fundamental idea of Shamanism.”[328] The shaman’s power depends on knowledge of the names, natures and origins of all things and spirits, and of the words that control them; but also on his own extraordinary personality, as manifested in orgiastic frenzy. Megalomania, the vain imagination of being a “superman,” is generally characteristic of magicians. Nothing can be more contrary than this attitude to what most of us understand by Religion.

One condition of the prevalence of Shamanism among any people, or group of peoples, seems to be the absence from among them of chieftains who have attained to any high degree of political power, and the consequent non-existence of authoritative gods. Hence it spreads throughout the tribes of Northern Europe and Asia, from Finland to Kamtchatka, and with a less intensive sway amongst the Indians of North and South America. Under such conditions the shaman is subordinate to no one in this world; nor, therefore, in the spirit-world. But where there are authoritative chiefs, authoritative gods correlative with them are approached by an order of men who are priests rather than magicians—that is to say, are regarded as dealing less in magic than in prayer and sacrifice. And this state of affairs is apt to give rise to increasing pomp and extravagance of rites, to which there is no visible limit; so that in some cases, as in Ashanti and Mexico, worship became homicide, and a sort of national insanity was established. For from such practices there results no security in the satisfaction of desire; the caprice of the gods cannot by such means be overcome; their appetite grows by what it feeds on, and so does the fanaticism of the priesthood.

Now, in political affairs something similar happens: the caprice of despotic rulers becomes intolerable; and, in some countries, submission to their tyranny has amounted to a sort of national insanity. Elsewhere devices have been adopted to limit the power of rulers. Avoiding assassination or revolution, it has been found possible to impose upon a king restraints derived from his own sanctity and divine power. One such device has been to surround him with innumerable taboos which, at length, prevent him from doing anything. It is true that the ostensive reason for this was not the limitation of his power, but the preservation of his vitality, upon which hung the welfare of the whole world; and probably this was, at first, the conscious purpose; but one effect of it was to limit his power, and the utility of this was its natural sanction. There are many cases in human life in which a great advantage has been gained for the race by means which were intended by the conscious agents to have an entirely different result.[329] In several countries, where the king has been bound by taboos, another man has by some pretext usurped his power; so that this way of restraining despotism is not a good one. But in Japan, where it had been adopted by a political people, the Tycoon, who succeeded to the power of the taboo-burdened Mikado, himself fell at last under equivalent restrictions, whilst affairs were directed by his ministers. Such is the natural tendency of this device amongst positivists, like the Japanese; elsewhere it may transfer the regal power to warriors or to priests.[330] Another way of restraining the king is to establish the principle that he rules by the laws, and that laws, though made by himself, cannot be altered. And this may have been the purpose of the unchangeableness of the laws of the Medes and Persians; and according to the Book of Daniel[331] it was used in this way; though, certainly, the older authority of Herodotus[332] shows that, in some cases, the king’s advisers could find a way out for their master. Our own forefathers were no doubt the wisest people that ever lived; and their plan was to acknowledge fully the divinity that doth hedge a king, to declare that, in fact, he could do no wrong, and then to visit all the iniquities of government upon his ministers.

If kings need restraint, much more do invisible gods: and many nations have sought to limit their prerogative, either by Magic or by legal fictions which, in relation to gods, can have only a magical operation. Whilst the tone of the Rigveda is truly religious (though even there “the idea is often expressed that the might and valour of the gods is produced by hymns, sacrifices and especially offerings of soma”), “in the Yajurveda the sacrifice itself has become the centre of thought and desire, its correct performance in every detail being all-important. Its power is now so great that it not only influences but compels the gods to do the will of the officiating priest.”[333] In Egyptian rites of sacrifice and prayer, the kind of victim and the manner of slaying and cutting it up were minutely and unchangeably decreed. “The formulas accompanying each act of the sacrificial priest contained a certain number of words, whose due sequence and harmonies might not suffer the slightest modification even by the god himself, under penalty of losing their efficacy. They were always recited with the same rhythm, according to a system of melody in which every tone had its virtue, combined with movements that confirmed the sense and worked with irresistible effect; one false note, a single discord between the succession of gestures and the utterance of the sacramental words, any hesitation, any awkwardness in the accomplishment of a rite, and the sacrifice was vain.”[334] But if all was in order, the god was bound to grant the petition. Babylonian religious ceremonies “had for the most part the same end and object as the magical text used with them; they were not so much a communion with the deities of heaven, as an attempt to compel them by particular words to relieve the worshipper from trouble, or to bestow upon him some benefit.” Ceremonies, therefore, were useless unless accurately performed in word and deed; “ritual was a sort of acted magic.”[335] These accounts of the religious ceremonies of the highest barbaric civilisations are almost in the same words as William Ellis uses in his account of worship at Raiatea about the beginning of the nineteenth century; except that Ellis does not say that the Polynesian gods were bound to grant the requests so presented. Accordingly, I have treated the Raiatean example under Retrogradation, and those of Egypt and Babylon as cases of half-conscious policy. No doubt both retrogradation and policy were present in all cases; but it seems reasonable to suppose that the latter predominated where order was more settled (an analogue of the order required in heaven) and thought was better trained.

One may wonder why a magical ritual should be preferred and trusted rather than genuinely devotional worship; since it must, in fact, just as often result in disappointment. But, first, as to the priesthood, an elaborate ritual, difficult to carry out, is favourable to their power, because only professionals can execute it; so that they must necessarily be employed; and the more elaborate and exigent it is, the more necessary they are. But, then, the more attention the ritual demands, the less there is to spare for thinking of the gods. Secondly, as to the people, since the failure of worship in attaining our ends may be due either (animistically) to the caprice of the gods or (magically) to an error of the priest, it is not surprising that men should trust the specialist whose education is well attested rather than the god whose character is inscrutable. Thirdly, a magical ritual appeals to the expectation of uniformity, the sole ground of confidence concerning the future, and therefore what men most desire. Nevertheless, the religious form of the rites (though empty of religious feeling) is maintained; partly, because the whole political and ecclesiastical fabric rests upon the animistic tradition; partly, because Animism has such hold upon men’s minds that a few remain devout; whilst even those who regard the rites as magical do not perceive that magic is the antithesis of religion and rigidly excludes it. Only a few natural positivists and philosophers regard public worship as merely a political institution.