There seems every reason to suppose, as the same author suggests, that man first thought he had a spirit himself and as a consequence held that animals, plants and inanimate objects also contained spirits. Because the belief that the human body had a spirit can easily be accounted for, but there seems to be no valid reason why man should have thought that all other visible objects also contained spirits, except that at the period when he conceived of the existence of a soul or spirit he still held them to be possessed of life and self-conscious volition like himself. But certain beliefs, such as the universal existence of life, and of its distribution all over the body and transmission by contact and eating, the common life of the species, and possibly totemism itself, appear to have been pre-animistic or prior to any conception of or belief in a soul or spirit either in man himself or in nature.
59. The tranmission of qualities.
Primitive man thought that the life and all qualities, mental and physical, were equally distributed over the body as part of the substance of the flesh. He thus came to think that they could be transferred from one body or substance to another in two ways: either by contact of the two bodies or substances, or by the eating or assimilation of one by the other. The transmission of qualities by contact could be indicated through simply saying the two names of the objects in contact together, and transmission by eating through saying the two names with a gesture of eating. Thus if one ate a piece of tiger’s flesh, one assimilated an equivalent amount of strength, ferocity, cruelty, yellowness, and any other qualities which might be attributed to the tiger. Warriors and youths are sometimes forbidden to eat deer’s flesh because it will make them timid, but they are encouraged to eat the flesh of tigers, bears, and other ferocious animals, because it will make them brave. The Gonds, if they wish a child to be a good dancer, cause it to eat the flesh of a kind of hawk, which hangs gracefully poised over the water, with its wings continually flapping, on the look-out for its prey. They think that by eating the flesh the limbs of the child will become supple like the wings of the bird. If a child is slow in learning to speak, they give it to eat the leaves of the pīpal tree, which rustle continually in the wind and are hence supposed to have the quality of making a noise. All qualities, objective and instrumental, were conceived of in the same manner, because in the absence of verbs or abstract terms their proper relation to the subject and object could not be stated or understood. Thus if a woman’s labour in child-birth is prolonged she is given to drink water in which the charred wood of a tree struck by lightning has been dipped. Here it is clear that the quality of swiftness is held to have been conveyed by the lightning to the wood, by the wood to the water, and by the water to the woman, so as to give her a swift delivery. By a similar train of reasoning she is given to drink the water of a swiftly-flowing stream which thus has the quality of swiftness, or water poured through a gun-barrel in which the fouling of a bullet is left. Here the quality of swiftness appertaining to the bullet is conveyed by the soiling to the barrel and thence to the water and to the woman who drinks the water. In the above cases all the transfers except that to the woman are by contact. The belief in the transfer of qualities by contact may have arisen from the sensations of the body and skin, to which heat, cold and moisture are communicated by contact. It was applied to every kind of quality. A familiar instance is the worship of the marks on rocks or stone which are held to be the footprints left by a god. Here a part of the god’s divine virtue and power has been communicated through the sole of his foot to the rock dented by the latter. Touching for the king’s evil was another familiar case, when it was thought that a fraction of the king’s divine life and virtue was communicated by contact to the person touched and cured him of his ailment. The wearing of amulets where these consist of parts of the bodies of animals is based on the same belief. When a man wears on his person the claws of a tiger in an amulet, he thinks that the claws being the tiger’s principal weapon of offence contain a concentrated part of his strength, and that the wearer of the claws will acquire some of this by contact. The Gonds carry the shoulder-bone of a tiger, or eat the powdered bone-dust, in order to acquire strength. The same train of reasoning applies to the wearing of the hair of a bear, a common amulet in India, the hair being often considered as the special seat of strength.[124] The whole practice of wearing ornaments of the precious metals and precious stones appears to have been originally due to the same motive, as shown in the article on Sunār.
Image of the god Jagannāth, a form of Vishnu
If the Gonds want a child to become fat, they put it in a pigsty or a place where asses have rolled, so that it may acquire by contact the quality of fatness belonging to the pigs or asses. If they wish to breed quarrels in an enemy’s house, they put the seeds of the amaltās or the quills of the porcupine in the thatch of the roof. The seeds in the dried pods of this tree rattle in the wind, while the fretful porcupine raises its quills when angry. Hence the seeds will impart the quality of noise to the house, so that its inmates will be noisy, while the quills of the porcupine will similarly breed strife between them. The effects produced by weapons and instruments are thought of in the same manner. We say that an arrow is shot from a bow with such force as to penetrate the body and cause a wound. The savage could not think or speak in this way, because he had no verbs and could not think of nouns in the objective case. He thought of the arrow as an animate thing having a cutting or piercing quality. When placed in a suitable position to exercise its powers, it flew, of its own volition, through the air to the target, and communicated to it by contact some of the above quality. The idea is more easily realised in the case of balls, pieces of bone or other missiles thrown by magicians. Here the person whom it is intended to injure may be miles away, so that the object could not possibly strike him merely through the force imparted to it by the thrower. But when the magician has said charms over the missile, communicating to it the power and desire to do his will, he throws it in the proper direction and savages believe that it will go of its own accord to the person against whom it is aimed and penetrate his body. To pretend to suck pieces of bone out of the body, which are supposed to have been propelled into the victim by an enemy, is one of the commonest magical methods of curing an illness. The following instances of this idea are taken from the admirable collection in The Golden Bough[125]: “(In Suffolk) if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was festering, he remarked: ‘That didn’t ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out’ If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail, clean it and grease it every day to prevent the wound from festering.” Here the heat and festering of the wounds are held to be qualities of the axe, thorn or nail, which have been communicated to the person or animal wounded by contact. If these qualities of the instrument are reduced by cleaning and oiling it, then that portion of them communicated to the wound, which was originally held to be a severed part of the life and qualities of the instrument, will similarly be made cool and easy. It is not probable that the people of Suffolk really believe this at present, but they retain the method of treatment arising from the belief without being able to explain it. Similarly the Hindus must have thought that the results produced by the tools of artisans working on materials, and by the plough on the earth, were communicated by these instruments volitionally through contact; and this is why they worship once or twice a year the implements of their profession as the givers of the means of subsistence. All the stories of magic swords, axes, impenetrable shields, sandals, lamps, carpets and so on originally arose from the same belief.
60. The faculty of counting. Confusion of the individual and the species.
But primitive man not only considered the body as a homogeneous mass with the life and qualities distributed equally over it. He further, it may be suggested, did not distinguish between the individual and the species. The reason for this was that he could not count, and had no idea of numbers. The faculty of counting appears to have been acquired very late. Messrs. Spencer and Gillan remark of the aborigines of Central Australia:[126] “While in matters such as tracking, which are concerned with their everyday life, and upon efficiency in which they actually depend for their livelihood, the natives show conspicuous ability, there are other directions in which they are as conspicuously deficient. This is perhaps shown most clearly in the matter of counting. At Alice Springs they occasionally count, sometimes using their fingers in doing so, up to five, but frequently anything beyond four is indicated by the word oknira, meaning ‘much’ or ‘great.’ One is nintha, two thrama or thera, three mapitcha, four therankathera, five therankathera-nintha.” The form of these words is interesting, because it is clear that the word for four is two and two, or twice two, and the word for five is two and two and one. These words indicate the prolonged and painful efforts which must have been necessary to count as far as five, and this though in other respects the Australian natives show substantial mental development, having a most complicated system of exogamy, and sometimes two personal names for each individual. Again, the Andamanese islanders, despite the extraordinary complexity of their agglutinative language, have no names for the numerals beyond two.[127] It is said that the Majhwār tribe can only count up to three, while among the Bhatras the qualification for being a village astrologer, who foretells the character of the rainfall and gives auspicious days for sowing and harvest, is the ability to count a certain number of posts. The astrologer’s title is Meda Gantia, or Counter of Posts. The above facts demonstrate that counting is a faculty acquired with difficulty after considerable mental progress, and primitive man apparently did not feel the necessity for it.[128] But if he could not count, it seems a proper deduction that his eye would not distinguish a number of animals of the same species together, because the ability to do this, and to appraise distinct individuals of like appearance appears to depend ultimately on the faculty of counting. Major Hendley, a doctor and therefore a skilled observer, states that the Bhīls were unable to distinguish colours or to count numbers, apparently on account of their want of words to express themselves.[129] Now it seems clearly more easy for the eye to discriminate between opposing colours than to distinguish a number of individuals of the same species together. There are a few things which we still cannot count, such as the blades of grass, the ears of corn, drops of rain, snowflakes, and hailstones. All of these things are still spoken of in the singular, though this is well known to be scientifically incorrect. We say an expanse of grass, a field of corn, and so on, as if the grass and corn were all one plant instead of an innumerable quantity of plants. Apparently when primitive man saw a number of animals or trees of the same species together, the effect on him must have been exactly the same as that of a field of grass or corn on us. He could be conscious only of an indefinite sense of magnitude. But he did not know, as we do in the cases cited, that the objects he saw were really a collection of distinct individuals. He would naturally consider them as all one, just as children would think a field of grass or corn to be one great plant until they were told otherwise. But there was no one to tell him, nor any means by which he could find out his mistake. He had no plural number, and no definite or indefinite articles. Whether he saw one or a hundred tigers together, he could only describe them by the one word tiger. It was a long time before he could even say ‘much tiger,’ as the Australian natives still have to do if they see more animals than five together, and the Andamanese if they see more than two. The hypothesis therefore seems reasonable that at first man considered each species of animals or plants which he distinguished to have a separate single life, of which all the individuals were pieces or members. The separation of different parts of one living body presented no difficulties to his mind, since, as already seen, he believed the life to continue in severed fractions of the human body.
A connection between individuals, apparently based on the idea that they have a common life, has been noticed in other cases. Thus at the commencement of the patriarchal state of society, when the child is believed to derive its life from its father, any carelessness in the father’s conduct may injuriously affect the child. Sir E.B. Tylor notes this among the tribes of South America. After the birth of a child among the Indians of South America the father would eat no regular cooked food, not suitable for children, as he feared that if he did this his child would die.[130] “Among the Arawaks of Surinam for some time after the birth of a child the father must fell no tree, fire no gun, hunt no large game; he may stay near home, shoot little birds with a bow and arrow, and angle for little fish; but his time hanging heavy on his hands the only comfortable thing he can do is to lounge in his hammock.”[131] On another occasion a savage who had lately become a father, refused snuff, of which he was very fond, because his sneezing would endanger the life of his newly-born child. They believed that any intemperance or carelessness of the father, such as drinking, eating large quantities of meat, swimming in cold weather, riding till he was tired and sweated, would endanger the child’s life, and if the child died, the father was bitterly reproached with having caused its death by some such indiscretion.[132] Here the idea clearly seems to be that the father’s and child’s life are one, the latter being derived from and part of the former. The custom of the Couvade may therefore perhaps be assigned to the early patriarchal stage. The first belief was that the child derived its life from its mother, and apparently that the weakness and debility of the mother after childbirth were due to the fact that she had given up a part of her life to the child. When the system of female descent changed to male descent, the woman was taken from another clan into her husband’s; the child, being born in its father’s clan, obviously could not draw its life from its mother, who was originally of a different clan. The inference was that it drew its life from its father; consequently the father, having parted with a part of his life to his child, had to imitate the conduct of the mother after childbirth, abstain from any violent exertion, and sometimes feign weakness and lie up in the house, so as not to place any undue strain on the severed fraction of his life in his child, which would be simultaneously affected with his own, but was much more fragile.