Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)Lang, Andrew
Religion
Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Lang, Andrew
Myth; Mythology; Religion; Rites and ceremonies
(2) Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), p. 350.
(3) Op. Cit., 355.
(4) Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. 41.
(5) Kohl, Wanderings Round Lake Superior, pp. 58, 59; Muller, Amerikan
Urrelig., pp. 62-67.
(6) 1636, p. 109.
(7) Western Pacific, p. 84.
(8) Anthropologie der Natur-Volker, ii. 177.
(9) Origin of Civilisation, p. 33. A number of examples of this mental
attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., postea.
To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and classify, to people
familiar from childhood and its games with "vegetable, animal and
mineral," a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn,
any more than they are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must
naturally seem like what Mr. Max Muller calls "temporary insanity".
The imagination of the savage has been defined by Mr. Tylor as "midway
between the conditions of a healthy, prosaic, modern citizen, and of a
raving fanatic, or of a patient in a fever-ward". If any relics of
such imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will very closely
resemble the productions of a once universal "temporary insanity". Let
it be granted, then, that "to the lower tribes of man, sun and stars,
trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal, animate creatures,
leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies, and performing
their special functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like
beasts, or of artificial instruments like men; or that what men's eyes
behold is but the instrument to be used or the material to be shaped,
while behind it there stands some prodigious but yet half-human
creature, who grasps it with his hands or blows it with his breath. The
basis on which such ideas as these are built is not to be narrowed
down to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a
broad philosophy of nature; early and crude, indeed, but thoughtful,
consistent, and quite really and seriously meant."(1)
(1) Primtive Culture, i. 285.
For the sake of illustration, some minor examples must next be given
of this confusion between man and other things in the world, which
will presently be illustrated by the testimony of a powerful and long
diffused set of institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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