An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion

by F. B. Jevons

Dreams are occasions on which the longing for one loved and lost manifests itself, but they are not the cause or the origin of the affection and the longing. But dreams are not exclusively, specially, or even usually the domain in which religion plays a part. Hence the visions of the night, in which the memory of the departed and the craving for reunion with them are manifested, bear no necessary reference to religion; and it is therefore possible, and prima facie plausible, to maintain that the belief in the immortality of the soul has its origin in a centre quite distinct from the sphere of religion, and that it is only very slowly, if at all, that the belief in immortality comes to be incorporated with religion. On the other hand, the very craving for reunion or continued communion with those who are felt not to be lost but gone before, is itself the feeling which is, not the base, but at the base, of religion. In the lowest forms to which religion can be reduced, or in which it manifests itself, religion is a bond of community; it manifests itself externally in joint acts of worship, internally in the feeling that the worshippers are bound together by it and united with the object of their worship. This feeling of communion is not a mere article of intellectual belief, nor is it imposed upon the members; it is what they themselves desire. Höffding states the truth when he says that in its most rudimentary form we encounter "religion under the guise of desire"; but in saying so he omits the essence of the truth, that essence without which the truth that he partially enunciates may become wholly misleading,—he omits to say, and I think he fails to see, that the desire which alone can claim to be considered as religious is the desire of the community, not of the individual as such, and the desire of the community as united in common worship. The idea of religion as a bond of spiritual communion is implicit from the first, even though a long process of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spiritual communion of which man becomes conscious in his craving after reunion or continued communion with those who have departed this life. And it is with the history of his attempts to harmonise this desire with what he knows and demands of the universe otherwise, that we are here and now concerned.

So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the idea that death ends all, and divorces from us forever those we have loved and lost awhile, that the lower races of mankind have been pretty generally driven to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a mistake. It is widely held that there is no such thing as a natural death. Men do of course die, they may be killed; but it is not an ordinance of nature that a man must be killed; and, if he is killed, his death is not natural. So strong is this feeling that when a man dies and his death is not obviously a case of murder, the inference which the savage prefers to draw is that the death is really a case of murder, but that the murder has been worked by witchcraft or magic. Amongst the Australian black fellows, as we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some other man or perhaps even by a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked;" consequently, "in very many cases there takes place what the white man, not seeing beneath the surface, not unnaturally describes as secret murder; but in reality ... every case of such secret murder, when one or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the object of killing him, is in reality the exacting of a life for a life, the accused person being indicated by the so-called medicine man as one who has brought about the death of another man by magic, and whose life must therefore be forfeited" (Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 48).

What underlies this idea that by man alone is death brought into the world is that death is unnatural and is no part of the original design of things. When the fact comes to be recognised undeniably that deaths not caused by human agency do take place, then the fact requires explanation; and the explanation on which primitive races, quite independently of each other, hit is that as death was no part of the original design of things, its introduction was due to accident or mistake. Either men were originally exempt from death, or they were intended to be exempt. If they were intended to be exempt, then the inference drawn is that the intention was frustrated by the carelessness of the agent intrusted with the duty of making men deathless. If they were originally exempt from death, then the loss of the exemption has to be accounted for. And in either case the explanation takes the form of a narrative which relates how the mistake took place or what event it was that caused the loss of the exemption. I need not quote examples of either class of narrative. What I wish to do is to emphasise the fact that by primitive man death is felt to be inconsistent with the scheme of things. First, therefore, he denies that it can come in the course of nature, though he admits that it may be procured by the wicked man in the way of murder or magic. And it is at this stage that his hope of reunion with those loved and lost scarcely stretches beyond the prospect of their return to this world. Evidence of this stage is found partly in tales such as those told of the mother who returns to revisit her child, or of persons restored to life. Stories of this latter kind come from Tasmania, Australia, and Samoa, amongst other places, and are found amongst the Eskimo and American Indians, as well as amongst the Fjorts (J. A. MacCullough, The Childhood of Fiction, ch. IV). Even more direct evidence of the emotion which prompts these stories is afforded by the Ho dirge, quoted by Professor Tylor (P. C., II, 32, 33):—

"We never scolded you; never wronged you;
Come to us back!
We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together
Under the same roof;
Desert it not now!
The rainy nights and the cold blowing days are coming on;
Do not wander here!
Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again!
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.
The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.
Come to your home!
It is swept for you and clean; and we are there who loved you ever;
And there is rice put for you and water;
Come home, come home, come to us again!"

In these verses it is evident that the death of the body is recognised as a fact. It is even more manifest that the death of the body is put aside as weighing for naught against the absolute conviction that the loved one still exists. But reunion is sought in this world; another world is not yet thought of. The next world has not yet been called into existence to redress the sorrows and the sufferings of this life. Where the discovery of that solution has not been made, the human mind seeks such consolation as may be found elsewhere. If the aspiration, "come to us, come to us again," can find no other realisation, it welcomes the reappearance of the lost one in another form. In Australia, amongst the Euahlayi tribe, the mother who has lost her baby or her young child may yet believe that it is restored to her and born again in the form of another child. In West Africa, according to Miss Kingsley, "the new babies as they arrived in the family were shown a selection of small articles belonging to deceased members whose souls were still absent,—the thing the child caught hold of identified him. 'Why, he's Uncle John; see! he knows his own pipe;' or 'That's Cousin Emma; see! she knows her market calabash;' and so on." But it is not only amongst Australian black fellows or West African negroes that the attempt is made to extract consolation for death from the speculation that we die only to be reborn in this world. The theory of rebirth is put forward by a distinguished student of Hegel—Dr. McTaggart—in a work entitled Some Dogmas of Religion. It is admitted by Dr. McTaggart to be true that we have no memory whatever of our previous stages of existence; but he declares, "we may say that, in spite of the loss of memory, it is the same person who lives in the successive lives" (p. 130); and he appears to find the same consolation as his remote forefathers did in looking forward to a future stage of existence in which he will have no more memory of his present existence, and no more reason to believe in it, than he now has memory of, or reason to believe in, his preëxistence. "It is certain," he says, "that in this life we remember no previous lives," and he accepts the position that it is equally certain we shall have in our next life absolutely no memory of our present existence. That, of course, distinguishes Dr. McTaggart from the West African Uncle John who, when he is reborn, at any rate "knows his own pipe."

The human mind, as I have said, seeks such consolation as it may find in the doctrine of rebirth. It finds evidence of rebirth either in the behaviour of the new-born child or in its resemblance to deceased relations. But it also comes to the conclusion that the reincarnation may be in animal form. Whether that conclusion is suggested by the strangely human expression in the eyes of some animals, or whether it is based upon the belief in the power of transformation, need not be discussed. It is beyond doubt that transformation is believed in: the Cherokee Indian sings a verse to the effect that he becomes a real wolf; and "after stating that he has become a real wolf, the songster utters a prolonged howl, and paws the ground like a wolf with his feet" (Frazer, Kingship, p. 71). Indeed, identity may be attained or manifested without any process of transformation; in Australia, amongst the Dieri tribe, the head man of a totem consisting of a particular sort of a seed is spoken of by his people as being the plant itself which yields the seed (ib., p. 109). Where such beliefs are prevalent, the doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul in animal form will obviously arise at the stage of evolution which we are now discussing, that is to say when the soul is not yet supposed to depart to another world, and must therefore manifest itself in this world in one way or another, if not in human shape, then in animal form. In the form of what animal the deceased will be reincarnated is a question which will be answered in different ways. Purely fortuitous circumstances may lead to particular animals being considered to be the reincarnation of the deceased. Or the fact that the deceased has a particular animal for totem may lead the survivors to expect his reappearance in the form of that particular animal. The one fact of importance for our present purpose is that at its origin the belief in animal reincarnation had no necessary connection with the theory of future punishments and rewards. At the stage of evolution in which the belief in transmigration arose many animals were the object of genuine respect because of the virtues of courage, etc., which were manifested by them; or because of the position they occupied as totems. Consequently no loss of status was involved when the soul transmigrated from a human to an animal form. No notion of punishment was involved in the belief.

The doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration belong to a stage in the evolution of belief, or to a system of thought, in which the conviction that the death of the body does not entail the destruction of the soul is undoubted, but from which the conception, indeed the very idea, of another world than this is excluded. That conception begins to manifest itself where ancestor worship establishes itself; but the manifestation is incomplete. Deceased chieftains and heroes, who have been benefactors to the tribe, are remembered; and the good they did is remembered also. They are themselves remembered as the doers of good; and their spirits are naturally conceived as continuing to be benevolent, or ready to confer benefits when properly approached. But thus envisaged, they are seen rather in their relation to the living than in their relation to each other. It is their assistance in this world that is sought; their condition in the next world is of less practical importance and therefore provokes less of speculation, in the first instance. But when speculation is provoked, it proves ultimately fatal to ancestor worship.

First, it may lead to the question of the relation of the spirits of the deceased benefactors to the god or gods of the community. There will be a tendency to blur the distinction between the god and his worshippers, if any of the worshippers come to be regarded as being after death spirits from whom aid may be invoked and to whom offerings must be made. And if the distinction ceases after death, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain it during life; an emperor who is to be deified after death may find his deification beginning before his death. Belief in such deification may be accepted by some members of the community. Others will regard it as proof that religion is naught; and yet others will be driven to seek for a form of religion which affords no place for such deifications, but maintains explicitly that distinction between a god and his worshippers which is present in the most rudimentary forms of religion.

But though the tendency of ancestor worship is to run this course and to pass in this way out of the evolution of religion, it may be arrested at the very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been in one case at least, strong enough to stand against it at the beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there was a tendency to ancestor worship, as is shown by the fact of its prohibition. But it was stamped out; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief in the continued existence of the soul after death ceased for long to have any practical influence. "Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the land where all things are forgotten'" (Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. Sheol). "In death," the Psalmist says to the Lord, "there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?" "Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?" Thus the Sheol of the Old Testament remains to testify to the view taken of the state of the dead by a people amongst whom the worship of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst such a people the dead are supposed simply to continue in the next world as they left this: "in Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil the ghost of Deiphobus still shows the ghastly wounds by which he perished (Jevons, History of Religion, p. 301).