As to defiance or contumely towards the Gods, finally, we have the testimony of the Swiss missionary Junod that the South African Thonga, whom he studied very closely, have in their ritual “a regular insulting of the Gods.” (Life of a South African Tribe, ii, 1912, p. 384.) Why not? “Prayers to the ancestors ... are ... absolutely devoid of awe” (p. 385), though “the ancestor-Gods are certainly the most powerful spiritual agency acting on man’s life” (p. 361); and “the spirits of the ancestors are the main objects of religious worship” (p. 344). The Thonga, again, use “neither idolatry nor fetishism,” having no “idols” (p. 388), though they recognize “hidden virtues” in plants, animals, and stones (p. 345). They simply regard their ancestor-Gods very much as they do their aged people, whom they generally treat with little consideration. But the dead can do harm, and must therefore be propitiated—as savages propitiate, with fear or malice or derision in their hearts, as the case may be. (Cp. p. 379.) On the other hand, despite the denial of their “fetishism,” they believe that ancestor-Gods may come in the shape of animals; and they so venerate a kind of palladium (made up like a medicine-man’s amulet) as to raise the question whether this kind of belief is not just that which Miss Kingsley called “fetish.” (Junod, pp. 358, 373–74.)
Whatever may be the essence, or the varieties, of fetishism, it is clear that the beating of idols or threatening of Gods does not amount to rational doubt concerning the supernatural. Some general approach to that attitude may perhaps be inferred in the case of an economic revolt against the burdens of a highly specialized religious system, which may often have occurred in unwritten history. We shall note a recorded instance of the kind in connection with the question whether there are any savage tribes without religion. But it occurs in the somewhat highly evolved barbarism of pre-Christian Hawaii; and it can set up no inference as to any development of critical unbelief at lower levels. In the long stage of lower savagery, then, the only approach to freethinking that would seriously affect general belief would presumably be that very credulity which gave foothold to religious beliefs to begin with. That is to say, without anything in the nature of general criticism of any story or doctrine, one such might to some extent supersede another, in virtue of the relative gift of persuasion or personal weight of the propounders. Up to a certain point persons with a turn for myth or ritual-making would compete, and might even call in question each other’s honesty, as well as each other’s inspiration.
Since the rise of scientific hierology there has been a disposition among students to take for granted the good faith of all early religion-makers, and to dismiss entirely that assumption of fraud which was so long made by Christian writers concerning the greater part of every non-Christian system. The assumption had been passed on from the freethinkers of antiquity who formulated the view that all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to control the people.[8] Christian polemists, of course, applied it to all systems but their own. When, however, all systems are seen to be alike natural in origin, such charges are felt to recoil on the system which makes them; and latterly[9] Christian writers, seeing as much, have been fain to abandon the conception of “priestcraft,” adroitly representing it as an extravagance of rationalism. It certainly served rationalistic purposes, and the title of the supposititious medieval work on “The Three Impostors” points to its currency among unbelievers long ago; but when we first find it popularly current in the seventeenth century, it is in a Christian atmosphere.[10] Some of the early deists and others have probably in turn exaggerated the amount of deliberate deceit involved in the formation of religious systems; but nevertheless “priestcraft” is a demonstrable factor in the process. What is called the psychology of religion has been much obscured in response to the demand of religious persons to have it so presented as to flatter them in that capacity.[11] Such a claim cannot be permitted to overrule the fair inductions of comparative science.
Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults “priestcraft” has been “fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture”;[12] and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making of Mohammed[13]—a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some “primitives” known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys and women by the male adults.[14] Indeed, the majority of modern travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers.[15] If, then, we can point to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact, a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are in our own day described as remarkably truthful;[16] but they are not remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods; and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion and trance—a transition which comes easily to many savages.[17] But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes an adept in playing upon credulity.[18]
It belongs, in short, to the very nature of the priestly function, in its earlier forms, to develop in a special degree the normal bias of the undisciplined mind to intellectual fraud. Granting that there are all degrees of self-consciousness in the process, we are bound to recognize that in all of us there is “the sophist within,” who stands between us and candour in every problem either of self-criticism or of self-defence. And, if the instructed man recognizes this clearly and the uninstructed does not, none the less is the latter an exemplification of the fact. His mental obliquities are not any less real because of his indifference to them than are the acts of the hereditary thief because he does them without shame. And if we consider how the fetish-priest is at every turn tempted to invent and prevaricate, simply because his pretensions are fundamentally preposterous; and how in turn the priest of a higher grade, even when he sincerely “believes” in his deity, is bound to put forward as matters of knowledge or revelation the hypotheses he frames to account for either the acts or the abstentions of the God, we shall see that the priestly office is really as incompatible with a high sincerity in the primitive stages as in those in which it is held by men who consciously propound falsities, whether for their mere gain or in the hope of doing good. It may be true that the priestly claim of supernatural sanction for an ethical command is at times motived by an intense conviction of the rightness of the course of conduct prescribed; but none the less is such a habit of mind fatal to intellectual sincerity. Either there is sheer hallucination or there is pious fraud.
Given, however, the tendency to deceit among primitive folk, distrust and detection in a certain number of cases would presumably follow, constituting a measure of simple skepticism. By force partly of this and partly of sheer instability of thought, early belief would be apt to subsist for ages like that of contemporary African tribes,[19] in a state of flux.[20] Comparative fixity would presumably arise with the approach to stability of life, of industry, and of political institutions, whether with or without a special priesthood. The usages of early family worship would seem to have been no less rigid than those of the tribal and public cults. For primitive man as for the moderns definite organization and ritual custom must have been a great establishing force as regards every phase of religious belief;[21] and it may well have been that there was thus less intellectual liberty of a kind in the long ages of what we regard as primitive civilization than in those of savagery and barbarism which preceded them. On that view, systems which are supposed to represent in the fullest degree the primeval spontaneity of religion may have been in part priestly reactions against habits of freedom accompanied by a certain amount of skepticism. A modern inquirer[22] has in some such sense advanced the theory that in ancient India, in even the earlier period of collection of the Rig-Veda, which itself undermined the monarchic character of the pre-Vedic religion, there was a decay of belief, which the final redaction served to accelerate. Such a theory can hardly pass beyond the stage of hypothesis in view of the entire absence of history proper in early Indian literature; but we seem at least to have the evidence of the Veda itself that while it was being collected there were deniers of the existence of its Gods.[23]
The latter testimony alone may serve as ground for raising afresh an old question which recent anthropology has somewhat inexactly decided—that, namely, as to whether there are any savages without religious beliefs.
[For old discussions on the subject see Cicero, De natura deorum, i, 23; Cumberland, Disquisitio de legibus naturæ, 1672, introd. (rejecting negative view as resting on inadequate testimony); Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. I, ch. iii, § 9; ch. iv, § 8 (accepting negative view); protests against it by Vico (Scienza Nuova, 1725, as cited above, p. 26); by Shaftesbury (Letters to a Student, 1716, rep. in Letters, 1746, pp. 32–33); by Rev. John Milne, An Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion (anon.), 1700, pp. 5–8; and by Sir W. Anstruther, Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1701, p. 24; further protests by Lafitau (Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, 1724, i, 5), following Boyle, to the effect that the very travellers and missionaries who denied all religion to savages avow facts which confute them; and general view by Fabricius, Delectus argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum, Hamburghi, 1725, ch. viii. Cp. also Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, § 2.
Büchner (Force and Matter, ch. on “The Idea of God”); Lord Avebury = Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, 5th ed., pp. 574–80; Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., pp. 213–17); and Mr. Spencer (Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583) have collected modern travellers’ testimonies as to the absence of religious ideas in certain tribes. Cp. also J. A. St. John’s (Bohn) ed. of Locke, notes on passages above cited, and on Bk. IV, ch. x, § 6. As Lord Avebury points out, the word “religion” is by some loosely or narrowly used to signify only a higher theology as distinct from lower supernaturalist beliefs. He himself, however, excludes from the field of “religion” a belief in evil spirits and in magic—here coinciding with the later anthropologists who represented magic and religion as fundamentally “opposed”—a view rejected even by some religionists. Cp. Avebury, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, (1911), p. 116 sq.; Rev. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 3; Prof. T. Witten Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, pp. 18–24. The proved erroneousness of many of the negative testimonies has been insisted on by Benjamin Constant (De la Religion, 1824, i, 3–4); Theodore Parker (Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, 1842 and 1855, ed. 1877, p. 16); G. Roskoff (Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, Abschn. I and II); Dr. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, pp. 417–25); and Dr. Max Müller (Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 42 sq.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 91 sq.; Natural Religion, 1889, pp. 81–89; Anthropological Religion, 1892, pp. 428–35.)
The Rev. H. A. Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 346) shows how easily misconception on the subject may arise. Galton (Narrative of an Explorer, ch. viii, ed. 1891, p. 138) writes: “I have no conception to this day whether or no the Ovampo have any religion, for Click was frightened and angry if the subject of death was alluded to.” The context shows that the native regarded all questions on religious matters with suspicion. Schweinfurth, again, contradicts himself twice within three pages as to the beliefs of the Bongo in a “Supreme Being” and in a future state; and thus leaves us doubting his statement that the neighbouring race, the Dyoor, “put no faith at all in any witchcraft” (The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 143–45). Much of the confusion turns on the fact that savages who practise no worship have religious beliefs (cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1878, p. 17, citing Monsignor Salvado; and Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, 1889, p. 284). The dispute, as it now stands, mainly turns on the definition of religion (cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. 1891, pp. 16–18, where Lubbock’s position is partly misunderstood). Dr. Tylor, while deciding that no tribes known to us are religionless, leaves open the question of their existence in the past.