The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

by Grant Allen

To begin with, it may be as well to premise that the problem of the origin of cultivation is a far more complex one than appears at first sight. For we have not only to ask, as might seem to the enquirer unaccustomed to such investigations, “How did the early savage first find out that seeds would grow better when planted in open soil, already freed from weeds or natural competitors?” but also the other and far more difficult question, “How did the early savage ever find out that plants would grow from seeds at all?” That, I take it, is the real riddle of the situation, and it is one which, so far as I know, has hitherto escaped all enquirers into the history and origin of human progress.

Fully to grasp the profound nature of this difficulty we must throw ourselves back mentally into the condition and position of primitive man. We ourselves have known so long and so familiarly the fact that plants grow from seeds—that the seed is the essential reproductive part of the vegetable organism—that we find it hard to unthink that piece of commonplace knowledge, and to realise that what to us is an almost self-evident truth is to the primitive savage a long and difficult inference. Our own common and certain acquaintance with the fact, indeed, is entirely-derived from the practice of agriculture. We have seen seeds sown from our earliest childhood. But before agriculture grew up, the connexion between seed and seedling could not possibly be known or even suspected by primitive man, who was by no means prone to make abstract investigations into the botanical nature or physiological object of the various organs in the herbs about him. That the seed is the reproductive part of the plant was a fact as little likely in itself to strike him as that the stamens were the male organs, or that the leaves were the assimilative and digestive surfaces. He could only have found out that plants grew from seeds by the experimental process of sowing and growing them. Such an experiment he was far from likely ever to try for its own sake. He must have been led to it by some other and accidental coincidence.

Now what was primitive man likely to know and observe about the plants around him? Primarily one thing only: that some of them were edible, and some were not. There you have a distinction of immediate interest to all humanity. And what parts of plants were most likely to be useful to him in this respect as foodstuffs? Those parts which the plant had specially filled up with rich material for its own use or the use of its offspring. The first are the roots, stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in which it lays by foodstuffs for its future growth; the second are the seeds which it produces and enriches in order to continue its kind to succeeding generations.

Primitive man, then, knows the fruits, seeds, and tubers, just as the squirrel, the monkey, and the parrot know them, as so much good foodstuff, suitable to his purpose. But why should he ever dream of saving or preserving some of these fruits or seeds, when he has found them, and of burying them in the soil, on the bare off-chance that by pure magic, as it were, they might give rise to others? No idea could be more foreign to the nature and habits of early man. In the first place, he is far from provident; his way is to eat up at once what he has killed or picked; and in the second place, how could he ever come to conceive that seeds buried in the ground could possibly produce more seeds in future? Nay, even if he did know it—which is well-nigh impossible—would he be likely, feckless creature that he is, to save or spare a handful of seeds to-day in order that other seeds might spring from their burial-place in another twelvemonth? The difficulty is so enormous when one fairly faces it that it positively staggers one; we begin to wonder whether really, after all, the first steps in cultivation’ could ever have been taken.

The savage, when he has killed a deer or a game-bird, does not bury a part of it or an egg of it in the ground, in the expectation that it will grow into more deer or more bird hereafter. Why, then, should he, when he has picked a peck of fruits or wild cereals, bury some of them in the ground, and expect a harvest? The savage is a simple and superstitious person; but I do not think he is quite such a fool as this proceeding would make him out to be. He is not likely ever to have noticed that plants in the wild state grow from seeds—at least prior to the rise of agriculture, from which, as I believe, he first and slowly gained that useful knowledge. And he certainly is not likely ever to have tried deliberate experiments upon the properties of plants, as if he were a Fellow of the Royal Society. These two roads being thus effectually blocked to us, we have to enquire, “Was there ever any way in which primitive man could have blundered blindfold upon a knowledge of the truth, and could have discovered incidentally to some other function of his life the two essential facts that plants grow from seeds, and that the growth and supply of useful food-plants can be artificially increased by burying or sowing such seeds in ground cleared of weeds, that is to say of the natural competing vegetation?”

I believe there is one way, and one way only, in which primitive man was at all likely to become familiar with these facts. I shall try to show that all the operations of primitive agriculture very forcibly point to this strange and almost magical origin of cultivation; that all savage agriculture retains to the last many traces of its origin; and that the sowing of the seed itself is hardly considered so important and essential a part of the complex process as certain purely superstitious and bloodthirsty practices that long accompany it. In one word, not to keep the reader in doubt any longer, I am inclined to believe that cultivation and the sowing of seeds for crops had their beginning as an adjunct of the primitive burial system.

Up to the present time, so far as I know, only one origin for cultivation has ever been even conjecturally suggested; and that is a hard one. It has been said that the first hint of cultivation may have come from the observation that seeds accidentally cast out on the kitchen-middens, or on the cleared space about huts, caves, or other human dwelling-places, germinated and produced more seeds in succeeding seasons. Very probably many savages have observed the fact that food-plants frequently grow on such heaps of refuse. But that observation alone does not bring us much nearer to the origin of cultivation. For why should early man connect such a fact with the seeds more than with the bones, the shells, or the mere accident of proximity? We must rid our minds of all the preconceptions of inductive and experimental science, and throw ourselves mentally back into the position of the savage to whom nature is one vast field of unrelated events, without fixed sequence or physical causation. Moreover, a kitchen-midden is not a cleared space: on the contrary, it is a weed-bed of extraordinary luxuriance. It brings us no nearer the origin of clearing.

There is, however, one set of functions in which primitive men do actually perform all the essential acts of agriculture, without in the least intending it; and that is the almost universal act of the burial of the dead. Burial is, so far as I can see, the only object for which early races, or, what comes to the same thing, very low savages, ever turn or dig the ground. We have seen already that the original idea of burial was to confine the ghost or corpse of the dead man by putting a weight of earth on top of him; and lest this should be insufficient to keep him from troublesome reappearances, a big stone was frequently rolled above his mound or tumulus, which is the origin of all our monuments, now diverted to the honour and commemoration of the deceased. But the point to which I wish just now to direct attention is this—that in the act of burial, and in that act alone, we get a first beginning of turning the soil, exposing fresh earth, and so incidentally eradicating the weeds. We have here, in short, the first necessary prelude to the evolution of agriculture.

The next step, of course, must be the sowing of the seed. And here, I venture to think, funeral customs supply us with the only conceivable way in which such sowing could ever have begun. For early men would certainly not waste the precious seeds which it took them so much time and trouble to collect from the wild plants around them, in mere otiose scientific experiments on vegetable development. But we have seen that it is the custom of all savages to offer at the tombs of their ancestors food and drink of the same kind as they themselves are in the habit of using. Now, with people in the hunting stage, such offerings would no doubt most frequently consist of meat, the flesh of the hunted beasts or game-birds; but they would also include fish, fruits, seeds, tubers, and berries, and in particular such rich grains as those of the native pulses and cereals. Evidence of such things being offered at the graves of the dead has been collected in such abundance by Dr. Tylor, Mr. Frazer, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I need not here adduce any further examples of so familiar a practice.

What must be the obvious result? Here, and here alone, the savage quite unconsciously sows seeds upon newly-turned ground, deprived of its weeds, and further manured by the blood and meat of the frequent sacrificial offerings. These seeds must often spring up and grow apace, with a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail to strike the imagination of the primitive hunter. Especially will this be the case with that class of plants which ultimately develop into the food-crops of civilised society. For the peculiarity of these plants is that they are one and all—maize, corn, or rice, pease, beans, or millet—annuals of rapid growth and portentous stature; plants which have thriven in the struggle for existence by laying up large stores of utilisable material in their seeds for the use of the seedling; and this peculiarity enables them to start in life in each generation exceptionally well endowed, and so to compete at an advantage with all their fellows. Seeds of such a sort would thrive exceedingly in the newly-turned and well-manured soil of a grave or barrow; and producing there a quantity of rich and edible grain, would certainly attract the attention of that practical and observant man, the savage. For though he is so incurious about what are non-essentials, your savage is a peculiarly longheaded person about all that concerns his own immediate advantage.