Strange Survivals: Some Chapters in the History of Man

by S. Baring-Gould

It is very much the same thing with the negro, who stands on the same intellectual level as the Siberian savage. His fetish is anything out of the way—a strangely-shaped stone or bit of bone, a bunch of feathers, a doll, anything about which his imagination may work, and his reason remain torpid.

I have watched a little boy of six play with a piece of ash twig. I drew it, and noted what his proceedings were. He had picked up this twig, and suddenly exclaimed, “I have found a horse. It is lying down. Get up, horse! Get up!” He took it to some grass to make it eat, then went with it to a pond, and made it drink. There the twig fell in, and he cried out that the horse was swimming. I picked out the twig for him. Presently, by throwing it into the air, he found that his horse could fly. Finally, he set to work to build a stable, and furnish it for his horse.

Fig. 36.—THE HORSE.

I had been reading Castrén’s account of the hakes and jitjan at the time, and under my eyes was a child doing with a bit of stick exactly what a Turanian nomad of full age does now, and has done for thousands of years. In two or three years this boy’s mind will have expanded, and his reason have got in the saddle, and will hold in the imaginative faculty with bit and bridle, and then he will cease to see horses in ash twigs; but the wanderers on the Asiatic tundras have never got beyond the stage of an English child of six and never will.

I quote a passage from “The Beggynhof; or, City of the Single,” to show how that it is possible for a tolerably-educated, religious Belgian of the present day to stand at the same point as that of a child of six, and of an Ostjak savage.

“St. Anthony is a favourite saint with the good, holy, simple-minded Beguines; but woe betide him if he refuse his powerful intercession. I once saw a poor little statuette of this domestic saint left outside on the window-sill when the snow lay deep on the ground. On inquiring why it did not occupy its place on the mantelshelf, I was told that the saint had been refractory; that the Beguine who occupied that room had been very patient and forbearing for some days, but that, finding gentleness had no effect in obtaining what she wanted, she now thought herself justified in trying what effect punishment would have, so she had turned the effigy of the rebellious saint out into the snow, and sat with her back towards it, that her patron might understand she did not intend to address him again until he granted her his protection and influence.”[27] Precisely in like manner, when Germanicus died, did the rabble of Rome pelt the temples and statues of the gods with mud and stones, because they had failed to hear their prayers for the recovery of their beloved prince.

We all of us pass through this stage of intellectual and spiritual growth, except a few who never get beyond it. It is said of the negro that as a child he is clever and bright, but that he never attains the mental condition of an European of fifteen. But there are men and women among us who, in certain matters, never get beyond the condition of mind of a child of six. We may be shocked at this, but we cannot help it; they are so constituted—something in their cranial structure, or some natural deficiency in mental vigour is the occasion of this. In religious matters they cannot get beyond Fetishism; and if we deny them that, we deny them all religious comfort and worship. Sometimes, through some accident, a leg or an arm gets diseased, whereas the rest of the body grows; so is it with the mind—certain faculties get diseased, perhaps the reasoning power, and then the imagination runs riot.

To an ordinary cultured Pagan of Rome, or Greece, or Egypt, idolatry was impossible. The gods, figured in marble and bronze, were to them symbols and nothing else, precisely as to us the letters of the alphabet are symbols of certain sounds, and the pictographic characters of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing were anciently symbols of certain ideas. So also idolatry is absolutely impossible to anyone who has gone through the elements of modern education. Religious statues and pictures are historic representations of personages and events in the sacred story, but to look upon them with the eyes of an Ostjak or a child of six is a psychological impossibility, except only for such as are mentally stunted like the Beguine of Ghent. It is, therefore, without the smallest scruple that we can employ imagery in our churches, knowing that the possibility of misusing it is gone past reversion to it in nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand, and that the thousandth person who would misuse it is incapable of any other religious exercise, and it were better that he had some religious conceptions, however low these were, than none at all.

To draw this moral has not been my object in penning this article, but to direct the attention of the intelligent to the nursery, and show them how that the elements for the study of primitive culture, the means of following the development of ideas in man are to be found wherever there are little children.