[30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move. I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas, which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind. A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive; everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic power.
[31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to Wuttke, J. G. Müller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for example, it is evident a priori that the sun does not possess all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more the round of its visible phases, that it is received and saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances. The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, Mythologie comparée, p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than the hunter or the warrior. According to J. G. Müller, savage and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.
[32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It almost always results in the personification of these forces.
[33] H. Spencer, Appendix to the Principles of Sociology.
[34] Brehm, Revue scientifique, p. 974, 1874.
[35] Espinas, Sociétiés animales, p. 181.
[36] See the author’s Morale d’Épicure (Des idées antiques sur la mort) 3d edition, p. 105.
[37] See Le Bon, L’Homme et les Sociétés, t. ii.
[38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul; assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.
This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples, a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success. Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared. “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest the head like pyrethrig.”