Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

The ceremonial law, so powerful in primitive condition, must have exerted a beneficial influence on the training of the individual. Its severe restrictions, its minute and ceaseless regulations of his life, taught him self-control and self-sacrifice. His first duty was not to himself but to the other members of his clan or totem. Obedience and systematic restraint were useful lessons inculcated on him from earliest childhood. The Congo Negro, the Andaman Islander, the American Indian, for whom his sponsors had taken vows at his birth, grew up to consider the fulfilment of these the chief end of his life. Their violation would entail disaster and disgrace not merely on himself but on his people. His religious education, therefore, cultivated in him some of the finest qualities of perfected manhood,—self-abnegation and altruism; for, as Professor Granger well says, “The primitive idea of holiness implies as its chief element, relation to the communal life.”[296]

If, therefore, with some writers, we must concede that in primitive conditions the individual was ever conceived with reference to the gens or community, on the other hand, we must recognise the potency of the religious element occasionally to separate him from others as one of “the elect”; to train him in self-realisation and self-government; and to cherish in his mind the germs of a free personality.[297]

More difficult is the decision of the question whether primitive religions increased the happiness of the individual.

I have mentioned more than once the generally joyous character of many of them, as seen in their rituals. But it would be a grave error not to dwell also upon the dread of evil spirits which is so conspicuous a part of most, and which keeps their votaries in a state of perpetual anxiety. Nor can the self-sacrifice I have referred to increase the cheerfulness of life, associated as it often is with painful mutilations, with prolonged fasting, and exposure to cold and heat. The cruelty of the ceremonies is often shocking, the edicts of the religious code merciless.

To compensate this, “the fearful looking forward to the wrath to come,” the fertile source of mental misery in advanced faiths, scarcely exists in those of primitive conditions. Death itself is thus deprived of its greatest terror, and the indifference with which it is met by most savages is matter of common note among travellers.

Nor does there exist in primitive conditions that fertile source of human misery, religious bigotry or intolerance, with its fatal train of persecutions, torture, and suspicion. The bloodiest sacrifices of heathendom have never entailed such personal unhappiness as the gloomy fanaticism of some forms of Christianity.

All these several lines of development are, it will be noted, external to religion itself. They modify it, and are modified by it. But there are other changes, wrought within the religious sense itself, which we must now consider.

Religions, like all other institutions, are subject to growth and decay, evolution and retrogression, development and death.

The vast majority of primitive faiths have disappeared totally, leaving no trace behind except the nameless images of their gods, or not even these. They were obliterated by conquest, or merged and lost in other forms of belief, or degenerated and petrified until they died a natural death.