Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

What the highest religions thus assume was likewise the foundation of the earliest and most primitive cults. The one universal trait amid their endless forms of expression was the unalterable faith in Mind, in the super-sensuous, as the ultimate source of all force, all life, all being.

Science and Christianity teach the same, but with this difference: the progress of observation has taught us the existence of certain uniform sequences which we call “laws of nature,” based solely on Mind, but representing its processes of realisation. The savage knew not these. He imagined every motion in nature was the immediate exhibition of Will, his own will in his own motions, some seen or unseen will in other motions. The seen were of another being like himself; the unseen were to that extent unknown, and these were his gods.

I repeat, wherever we find the divine, the spiritual agency, set forth in myth or symbol, creed or rite, we find it characterised by two traits: it is of the nature of the human mind, that is, super-sensuous; and it is the ultimate source of power. It will be my aim to show the expressions of these universal postulates of the religious sentiment in the rudest faiths of the world.

You may ask, by what process of thinking did primitive man assign mind to nature. The process is extremely simple, and is illustrated by the action of any child. Let one be accidentally hurt by an empty rocking-chair in motion; at once, it is angry at the chair, and is gratified to see it whipped! The child-mind assigns to the object the will and the sensations of which it is conscious in itself. This is the simplest explanation it can imagine for action.

Precisely so is it with the savage man. Wherever he perceives motion, independent of a living being, he assumes the presence of a conscious agent, not visible to his senses. As Professor Sayce remarks of the early Chaldeans: “To them the spiritual, the Zi, was that which manifested life, and the test of the manifestation of life was movement.”[36] This is universally true of primitive faiths.

But this was not enough. To most if not all primitive men, movement was not the only manifestation of life. To them, the immovable, the rock, the mountain, any inanimate object, was likewise a conscious spiritual agency, a thinking being. This, too, has its explanation in one of the simplest, most elementary traits of mind, the sense of Personality. To the undeveloped reason, the Other is ever conceived as Another, a Self, and is clothed with the attributes of the Self, of the thinking Ego. This is always the case in the tales of children and the myths of savage tribes.[37]

These are the earliest concepts of the religious faculty; but they would have been powerless to seize upon the emotions and to develop the great religions of the world, had they not been supported by that which is the corner-stone of every creed on earth, the corollary I mentioned, to wit, the direct communion between the human and the divine mind, between the Man and God.

This is the one trait shared by the highest as well as the lowest, it is the one proof of authenticity which each proclaims for itself. I shall tell you of religions so crude as to have no temples or altars, no rites or prayers; but I can tell you of none that does not teach the belief of the intercommunion of the spiritual powers and man. Every religion is a Revelation—in the opinion of its votaries. Those which are called the “book-religions” depend mainly upon the record of a revelation, while in all primitive faiths inspiration is actual and constant. The human soul, regarded in its origin as an emanation of the Divine, is in its nature omniscient when in moments of ecstasy it frees itself from its material envelope.[38]

When an Australian native is asked if he has ever seen the great Creator, Baiame, he will reply: “No, not seen him, but I have felt [or inwardly perceived] him.”[39] A Basuto chief replied to the question whether his people knew of God before the missionaries came: “We did not know Him, but we dreamed of Him.”

All shamanism is based on a direct relation to divinity. The shaman is an inspired prophet and healer, and believes as firmly in his inspiration as do his credulous adherents. From shamanism was developed in India the practice known as Yoga, characterised by ecstatic seizures, periods of cerebral exaltation, and alleged divine powers.[40] To the same origin we must attribute the similar phenomena of “speaking with tongues,” and religious mania.