The use of the word “devil,” universal in and around Melanesia when speaking in pigeon English of the native mysteries and the objects of the native cult or fear, illustrates one of the pitfalls in the path of the anthropologist. The native ideas do not coincide with ours. The history, the environment, the social and intellectual condition of peoples in the lower culture are as diverse from ours as their geographical situation. Consequently their speech contains no equivalent for many of our words, even of words that seem to us to convey ideas elementary and simple. No Australian language possesses a word which is the exact equivalent of our word “mother.” The word we roughly equate with “mother” includes a host of other women beside her who has given birth to the child. Some of these women we should designate as “aunt,” or as “stepmother”; but many of them stand in no relation of kinship according to our reckoning. Yet they are all addressed and spoken of by the same term as the veritable mother. Kinship, in fact, is counted in the lower culture along lines quite different from ours; and though it is probable that our degrees of kindred have evolved from a rudimentary condition similar to that which we find among savages, we have so far outgrown it that their reckoning is often unintelligible to us, and only a very few of the terms in use among European nations remain to point back to an earlier stage of development. If we have this difficulty in finding equivalents for terms expressive of the simplest relationships of our social life, how much greater must be our difficulty when we come to terms expressive of the mysterious and supersensual relations of man to the unknown and dimly conceived powers of the universe about him! We have no word to render the Fijian mana, the Siouan wakan, the Malagasy andria-manitra. Conversely, scarce a savage language can render our word “God.” Over and over again missionaries have sought, and sought in vain, for a native word for the purpose. When they have fixed upon one, as often as not they have had to confess a blunder; and many times in despair they have invented a word. The idea embodied in the acts by which the mysterious relations between man and the supernatural are emphasized and knit together is equally incapable of translation by any one vocable. A Roman Catholic missionary, speaking of the religious assembly of the Creeks of North America, says: “The mitewewin represents the highest expression of magic (maeghiw or maskikiy) among the nations of the Algonkian stock. The word, in fact, signifies at the same time labour, occupation, judgement, adoration, and sacrifice. It is a religious act addressed to the powakans, or animal fetishes, and a sort of Illinoian freemasonry requiring initiation and inviolable secrecy; it is a camp-meeting…; it is the grand council of an entire nation.”[18.1] These sentences afford an excellent example of the difficulty of translating the native ideas into English words. They unite a brave and more or less successful attempt to convey the notion of mitewewin, with incidental but none the less certain failures in the cases of maeghiw or maskikiy and powakan. For none of them would a single English word, or even a phrase, be adequate.

The opportunity of blundering in the endeavour to understand and report the beliefs and usages of the lower races is obviously as great as could be desired. When to the various causes enumerated above is added not merely the conscious want of sympathy on the part of the observer, but his unconscious prejudice in favour of certain interpretations derived from the civilized and the specifically Christian notions in which he has been brought up from his youth, the wonder is not that so many mistakes have been made, but that we have on the whole succeeded in obtaining so large a mass of fairly trustworthy information. Even that of which we are the best assured, however, must be used with caution. It must be criticized, checked with other accounts of the same or neighbouring tribes; and allowance must be made for the personal equation of the observer. The use of a word like worship, spirit, or God, which connotes to us very different ideas from those connoted to the native mind by the native word thus translated, must put us at once on our guard. Fancied resemblances between the myths, heard perhaps at second-hand and only half-understood, and some story, Biblical or other, known to the reporter, and the expectation of finding in savage tradition some fragment of divine revelation have proved real Will-o’-the-wisps to the unwary. Nor must we forget that things actually seen are also liable to be misinterpreted. Captain John Smith, in writing of Virginia, describes as a human sacrifice—a sacrifice of children—what seems to have been no more than the ceremony of initiation into manhood.[19.1] It is true that his account was written three hundred years ago, and that he was not allowed to witness the whole performance. But after all our subsequent experience and accumulation of records, nothing is harder even yet than to determine the meaning of ceremonies and institutions, often carefully examined and minutely described by skilled eyewitnesses and scientific explorers.

We may go further still. Where the observer puts aside his prejudices, where he is animated by true sympathy—not the false and mawkish sympathy that too often takes its place—where he is able to communicate with the natives in their own tongue, there is notwithstanding very often a difficulty in following their ideas. We have been told of the Andaman Islanders that “with these, as with other savages, it is vain to expect them to understand the logical conclusions to which their beliefs tend.”[20.1] That may be because they have never thought them out. In the majority of cases it would probably be juster to say that their logic follows a different course, their ideas run in different channels, from ours. After conceding everything that has been said with perfect truth as to their vagueness, their indolence of mind on subjects not concerned with their daily life, and their dislike of intellectual effort, there remains the fact that they are human; they do reason, albeit after their own fashion. Language among the higher races has been trained and tortured during many centuries to express the highest thoughts of the highest thinkers; and how inadequate an instrument has it often been found! It must therefore not surprise us if the thought of races in the lower culture occasionally surpasses a language not yet exercised and adapted to the complicated processes of ideation and ratiocination. Thus not merely is it difficult or impossible to translate native words by English equivalents, as I have already pointed out: the native finds it not easy to translate his thoughts into his own tongue. When he has struggled with more or less success to effect this, his course of thought is so widely different from ours that we can hardly believe in its coherence.

The objects of thought, alike among savages and among ourselves, fall into categories. Many of these categories manifest themselves in the very fibre of language. A familiar illustration is the curious distinctions of grammatical gender, so different even in different languages sprung from a common stock, and those comparatively simple, as are the Aryan tongues of civilization. When we refer to the languages of the lower culture, with their minute distinctions of number and person, of action, tense, and all sorts of relations of time and place, we are overwhelmed by their complexity and puzzled by the oddness of their grouping. Categories of another kind become visible when we attempt to push our explorations further into savage thought. The counting of kinship and the difficulties attending the attempt to translate words expressive of religious ideas have already been mentioned. In the totemism of Australia the totems are classes of animals or other objects not merely united by some mystic bond to one or other class of tribesmen; they are related to other objects of human environment in such a way that the whole universe is shared among them. To us these relationships are strange and inexplicable; they form categories that we do not understand. To the native these categories are familiar by immemorial association; they have become part of the texture of his mind; and thereby they have acquired emotional values, from the bonds of which he can hardly deliver himself. So it seems that the West African Bantu comprise their entire social system, every activity of their mental and physical life, and every aspect of the external universe under a limited number of categories wholly alien to our modes of thought. Hints of them are perhaps to be found in the various classes of Bantu nouns that have not yet been fully explained by philologists. In any case the classification of these nouns is probably no arbitrary association of purely formal significance. It is based on some archaic experience, which has grouped together various objects often to us utterly dissimilar: the connecting links escape us.[22.1] Among other peoples in parts of the earth remote from one another categories have been discovered associating and dissociating acts and modes of feeling, and apportioning their environment in unexpected ways. Such categories must react on mentality to an extent that we can hardly measure. They form part of the traditional presuppositions of thought. They are the framework in which ideas are grouped. We, who have gradually elaborated and established through generations of increasing discovery and invention a habit of regarding everything from a more or less scientific standpoint, have acquired a series of presuppositions of an entirely different character. To the educated classes of Europe and America they in their turn have become traditional. They are the axioms from which we argue. Every new experience must be fitted into the framework thus supplied, otherwise we cannot logically interpret it. At the best we may make for it what has been wittily called a watertight compartment. Men of the lower culture brought suddenly into contact with civilization and civilized ideas experience a corresponding difficulty. Missionaries are often in despair over their converts’ relapses. These relapses are occasioned not merely by the difference of moral atmosphere, but quite as much by the intellectual abyss between savagery and civilization. Christianity and heathenism—the new and the old—are jumbled together in the convert’s mind. His traditional modes of thought are as little changed as his outward environment, and the new ideas are incongruous with them. The result is chaos. So the civilized enquirer into savage belief is constantly brought up in what seems a blind alley. He cannot find the way out, not because there is not a logical issue, but because the landscape is unfamiliar. He attempts to adapt the thoughts of the savage, so far as he has seized them, to his own totally different mental framework; and they are refractory. Not until the effort is abandoned, and patient, unprejudiced search has discovered the true pattern of the puzzle, will it be solved.

For it needs a considerable apprenticeship to enable the observer, in Miss Kingsley’s phrase, to “think black,” to understand the logic of “black” thought, and accurately, or at least approximately, to reproduce its process and aims. When we are told, therefore, by a writer whom I cited a few pages back that the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is beyond the grasp of the West African Bantu, that statement must be taken with some qualification. It should be explained that it is the relation of cause and effect according to our ideas and our reasoning that is beyond the native grasp, because our axioms are unknown to him; he reasons from quite another set of logical presuppositions. To change the figure, he is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we ourselves emerged long ago. If we would comprehend him we must painfully climb down into that world again, breathe its air, familiarize ourselves with its scenes of wonder and of terror, and make intimate companions of all its strange inhabitants. Thus and thus only can we recover the clue that will lead us safely through the shadowy forests and haunted valleys and over the primeval mountain-tops of native thought. Then we shall find that the savage is not so irrational as we have thought him, and that in his wildest divergence from our methods of reasoning he has a method of his own—a method followed once upon a time by our own ancestors, a method from which the peasantry of many a European country is not yet wholly emancipated.

This is to “think black.” It is not everybody who can do it: it requires more sympathy and insight than are given to all men. Above all, it requires patience, long and close contact with the native, and the persistent and self-abandoning endeavour to penetrate his thoughts. Some missionaries have achieved it, some travellers, some traders, some colonists, some government officials. Too many of them, alas! have only skimmed the surface of the native mind. Even the latter, however, though they have failed to read the underlying meaning of what they saw, have sometimes taught us what to look for. To that extent the modern school of anthropology is founded on their observations. The training now given in anthropology at the universities and elsewhere utilizes and criticizes the reports of all observers, as well as the conclusions drawn from them by anthropologists at home. That training is of material assistance in fitting new labourers out for fresh fields of enquiry, or for working over again those fields which have been hitherto imperfectly reaped by ill-equipped enquirers. In some measure it supplies the place of longer preliminary intercourse with the man of lower culture; and it has the advantage that it teaches the student what kind of phenomenon to expect—an advantage perhaps not unaccompanied by dangers of its own.

Be that as it may, the information of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, already at our service on the subject of the religions of the lower culture has been and is still being subjected to ruthless comparison and criticism. The result of this constant sifting is to put us in possession of a considerable body of material for a sane judgement in regard to some of the beliefs of tribes in various parts of the world and to help us forward on the track of others. We no longer summarily deny the possession of religion to tribes whose practices we do not understand. We no longer attempt to docket beliefs imperfectly apprehended under headings applicable only to the highly developed and literary theology of Europe. We lie under a more insidious temptation—that of the too rapid generalization of the beliefs of the lower culture, for which the groundwork may not as yet exist. But we are learning the lesson that only by unwearied investigation, diligent observation, sympathetic enquiry without prepossession, can we attain to a real grasp of the protean ideas and half-formulated speculations of savage minds.

THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION
AND MAGIC

I. The Common Root

Thus forewarned of the difficulties and dangers of our path, let us proceed to enquire whether there are any general ideas relating to religion disseminated among men in the lower stages of culture, that either are themselves primitive, or can have been derived from an earlier condition of thought discoverable by us.