And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one supreme demand—to live.
The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.
But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the realm of the invisible.
In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause and effect.
If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid of the stuff as soon as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.
The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past, present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune which comes as the revenge of the Gods.
He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown upon him.
As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him for his trouble.
It follows that a society in which everything happens as the result of the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.
Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect form to his own children.