The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

by John M. Tyler

The pictures on the cave-walls of France probably had a magical or religious purpose. Here we find very few representations of human beings. But in a rock-painting at Cogul, possibly Neolithic though probably older, we see a group of women apparently engaged in some rite of magic or religion. The occurrence of amulets also does not surprise us.

We cannot make a study of primitive ritual magic and religion, their origin, form, and content. But even our hasty glance shows us that man had been wondering and thinking about this subject during millennia before our Neolithic time, had been forced to accept many profound convictions, containing germs of sublime truth overlaid, like our own, with many errors; he had elaborated a system of ritual, and had travelled far along the road of religious experience and discoveries long before this comparatively recent epoch.

The conspicuous features of the religion of this ancient period of primeval stupidity, or Urdummheit, to borrow the German word, were the host of invisible powers or dæmons, and the law of taboo, the forbidden thing. Breach of taboo rendered not only the individual lawbreaker but the whole tribe, however innocent, liable to punishment. The whole community was responsible for every deed of any and every one of its members, and suffered or prospered accordingly. When Agamemnon had wronged the priest of Apollo, the god shot his arrows not at Agamemnon but throughout the innocent Greek host. The children of Israel were routed at Ai, because Achan had taken the devoted or forbidden thing. This stage of tribal responsibility seems to be practically universal. It gave the law an iron grip on the people, tamed them, and made them march in lock-step, a necessary stage of terrible discipline. But only under the protection and stimulus of this tribal feeling of common responsibility and resulting tribal conscience could the individual conscience be gradually awakened and developed, and finally break through the cake or crust of custom into freedom and light.

All these forces and influences were acting throughout the Neolithic and later periods, and are still with us. Perhaps we can gain a tolerably distinct and correct view of Neolithic religion among the Mediterranean peoples by a glance at the ancient Greek mysteries. Students of Greek art and literature quite naturally have been very slow to take interest in these crude, often ugly and indecent, rituals. But for this very reason the primitive stands out all the more sharply defined against the brilliant, beautiful, artistic Olympian religion of Greek art and literature, and particularly of Homer. Students like Professor Murray could hardly be expected to explore these lower strata with great sympathy. For this very reason, as somewhat unwilling witnesses to whatever is good or great in primitive Greek ritual, their testimony is all the more valuable, though probably hardly as just as that of Miss Harrison.[159] We shall follow mainly Professor Murray’s vivid portrayal.[160] In his Saturnia Regna he pictures the ritual and belief of the ancient Greeks before the arrival of Achæans or Hellenes in any strict sense of the word. Strictly speaking, it is a description of the religion of the Bronze Age during the earlier part of the second millennium B. C. It has been growing, developing, and undergoing modifications since Neolithic time, but in all its essential features it is ancient.

We find here very few traces of the chief Olympian divinities, which belong to a later age than the objects of worship or cult of these ancient peoples whom we venture to call Pelasgi. They worshipped powers or dæmons in indefinite numbers, but with no individual names: represented, if at all, by emblems or symbols, very rarely in bodily human form. Of these spirits of death, disease, madness, and calamity there were “thousands upon thousands, from whom man can never escape or hide.” So much is mainly a heritage from Paleolithic times. But the conception of spirit has grown more clear, distinct, and elevated, as we saw in our study of burial rites.

But Neolithic men lived in communities and devoted themselves largely to tillage of the ground and to raising sheep, goats, swine, and cattle. Their life was still precarious. “Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of agricultural works, which like most cruelty had its roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo—the ‘Forbidden Thing.’”

Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal responsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or magician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable sense of sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality toward the spirit world is now appearing in a religion previously almost or quite unmoral. We may easily overestimate the extent and power of the change, but we can hardly be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal possibilities of this dim feeling or conception.

In agriculture and throughout nature seed-time was followed by harvest, fall, and winter’s gloom and death. Then in the next spring there was a return, a rebirth or a resurrection. If the seed failed to come up, if the blade withered or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit or dæmon had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the forbidden thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they must help the spirit. Hence there must be every year a time of purification, of renovation, when the old garments and utensils and everything which could carry the pollution of death were cast off or cleansed.

All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance to which we will return later, are expressed or symbolized in the great Dromena, festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may call these rites of pre-Homeric Greece. Then, for a time, they are partially, though never totally, eclipsed, by the brilliant beauty of the Olympian religion with its glorious temples, statues, and other works of art.