Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

Here I must define what is meant in these lectures by “religions.” Most people confine that term to the historic faiths and cults, calling others “superstitions” and “paganisms.” Some will not acknowledge that there is any religion whatever except their own; all other beliefs are heresies, apostasies, or heathenisms. Even such an intelligent writer as Sir John Lubbock expressed doubts in one of his works whether he ought to apply the word “religions” to the worship tendered their deities by savages.

On the other hand, a Protestant will freely denounce the practices of the Roman Church as “superstitions,” and will claim that they are degenerations of religion; while among Protestants, the Quaker looks upon all external rites as equally “superstitious.”

No such distinctions can be recognised in ethnology. The principle at the basis of all religions and all superstitions is the same, as I shall show in the next lecture, and the grossest rites of barbarism deserve the name of “religion” just as much as the refined ceremonies of Christian churches. The aims of the worshipper may be selfish and sensuous, there may be an entire absence of ethical intention, his rites may be empty formalities and his creed immoral, but this will be his religion all the same, and we should not apply to it any other name.[19]

There is no one belief or set of beliefs which constitutes a religion. We are apt to suppose that every creed must teach a belief in a god or gods, in an immortal soul, and in a divine government of the world. The Parliament of Religions, which lately met at Chicago, announced, in its preliminary call, these elements as essential to the idea of religion.

No mistake could be greater. The religion which to-day counts the largest number of adherents, Buddhism, rejects every one of these items.[20] The Jewish doctrine of the Old Testament, the Roman religion of the time of Julius Cæsar, and many others, have not admitted the existence of a soul, or the continuance of the individual life after death.[21] Some believe in souls, but not in gods; while a divine government is a thought rarely present in savage minds. They do not, as a rule, recognise any such principle as that of good and evil, or any doctrine of rewards and punishment hereafter for conduct in the present life.

There is, in fact, not any one item in any creed which is accepted by all religions; yet a common source, a common end in view, and the closest analogy of means to that end, bind all in one, representing an indefeasible element of human nature, the lowest containing the potentiality of the highest, the highest being but the necessary evolution of the lowest. The same promptings which led the earliest of men to frame their crude ideas about the super-sensuous around them have nourished and developed religions ever since, and keep them alive to-day. Temples may crumble and creeds decay, but the spirit remains the same.

This inherent unity of all religious feeling and expression was long ago perceived by St. Augustine. In a well-known passage of his Retractations he makes the striking remark: “Res ipsa, quæ nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani”; “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning.”

This is, essentially, the maxim of modern ethnology. The religiosity of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, falsehoods, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man’s creeds and cults: to them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have hallowed and glorified his long search for the perfect and the eternal.

If this opinion of the place of religion in ethnology is correct, we should not expect to find any considerable number of men, in the present epoch of the race’s development, devoid of some form of worship and belief.

The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion, under some form.