Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
(including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that
they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man
fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these
beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse,
or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them
and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we
could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired
the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age
of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand)
that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense
of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties
binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it
is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed
the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that
he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
consciousness.
(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
found among the lower races."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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