The theme here broached is a vast one, and I hope to pursue it hereafter by describing the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, as these have been found among the other principal races of the world both in ancient and modern times. Of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted so deep and far-reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead; hence an historical survey of this most momentous creed and of the practical consequences which have been deduced from it can hardly fail to be at once instructive and impressive, whether we regard the record with complacency as a noble testimony to the aspiring genius of man, who claims to outlive the sun and the stars, or whether we view it with pity as a melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying into that great mystery of which fools profess their knowledge and wise men confess their ignorance.
J. G. FRAZER.
Cambridge,
9th February 1913.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Preface
Table of Contents
[Lecture I.]—Introduction
Natural theology, three modes of handling it, the dogmatic, the philosophical, and the historical, pp. 1 sq.; the historical method followed in these lectures, 2 sq.; questions of the truth and moral value of religious beliefs irrelevant in an historical enquiry, 3 sq.; need of studying the religion of primitive man and possibility of doing so by means of the comparative method, 5 sq.; urgent need of investigating the native religion of savages before it disappears, 6 sq.; a portion of savage religion the theme of these lectures, 7 sq.; the question of a supernatural revelation dismissed, 8 sq.; theology and religion, their relations, 9; the term God defined, 9 sqq.; monotheism and polytheism, 11; a natural knowledge of God, if it exists, only possible through experience, 11 sq.; the nature of experience, 12 sq.; two kinds of experience, an inward and an outward, 13 sq.; the conception of God reached historically through both kinds of experience, 14; inward experience or inspiration, 14 sq.; deification of living men, 16 sq.; outward experience as a source of the idea of God, 17; the tendency to seek for causes, 17 sq.; the meaning of cause, 18 sq.; the savage explains natural processes by the hypothesis of spirits or gods, 19 sq.; natural processes afterwards explained by hypothetical forces and atoms instead of by hypothetical spirits and gods, 20 sq.; nature in general still commonly explained by the hypothesis of a deity, 21 sq.; God an inferential or hypothetical cause, 22 sq.; the deification of dead men, 23-25; such a deification presupposes the immortality of the human soul or rather its survival for a longer or shorter time after death, 25 sq.; the conception of human immortality suggested both by inward experience, such as dreams, and by outward experience, such as the resemblances of the living to the dead, 26-29; the lectures intended to collect evidence as to the belief in immortality among certain savage races, 29 sq.; the method to be descriptive rather than comparative or philosophical, 30.
[Lecture II.]—The Savage Conception of Death
The subject of the lectures the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among certain of the lower races, p. 31; question of the nature and origin of death, 31 sq.; universal interest of the question, 32 sq.; the belief in immortality general among mankind, 33; belief of many savages that death is not natural and that they would never die if their lives were not cut prematurely short by sorcery, 33 sq.; examples of this belief among the South American Indians, 34 sqq.; death sometimes attributed to sorcery and sometimes to demons, practical consequence of this distinction, 37; belief in sorcery as the cause of death among the Indians of Guiana, 38 sq., among the Tinneh Indians of North America, 39 sq., among the aborigines of Australia, 40-47, among the natives of the Torres Straits Islands and New Guinea, 47, among the Melanesians, 48, among the Malagasy, 48 sq., and among African tribes, 49-51; effect of such beliefs in thinning the population by causing multitudes to die for the imaginary crime of sorcery, 51-53; some savages attribute certain deaths to other causes than sorcery, 53; corpse dissected to ascertain cause of death, 53 sq.; the possibility of natural death admitted by the Melanesians and the Caffres of South Africa, 54-56; the admission marks an intellectual advance, 56 sq.; the recognition of ghosts or spirits, apart from sorcery, as a cause of disease and death also marks a step in moral and social progress, 57 sq.