The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
We are not told that success crowned these
experimental demonstrations of the immortality of the soul.(671)
(M211) The Toukaway Indians of Texas, one of whose totems is the wolf,
have a ceremony in which men, dressed in wolf-skins, run about on all
fours, howling and mimicking wolves. At last they scratch up a living
tribesman, who has been buried on purpose, and putting a bow and arrows in
his hands, bid him do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and murder.(672) The
ceremony probably forms part of an initiatory rite like the resurrection
from the grave of the old man in the Australian rites.
(M212) The simulation of death and resurrection or of a new birth at
initiation appears to have lingered on, or at least to have left traces of
itself, among peoples who have advanced far beyond the stage of savagery.
Thus, after his investiture with the sacred thread—the symbol of his
order—a Brahman is called “twice born.” Manu says, “According to the
injunction of the revealed texts the first birth of an Aryan is from his
natural mother, the second happens on the tying of the girdle of Muñga
grass, and the third on the initiation to the performance to a Srauta
sacrifice.”(673) A pretence of killing the candidate perhaps formed part
of the initiation to the Mithraic mysteries.(674)
(M213) Thus, on the theory here suggested, wherever totemism is found, and
wherever a pretence is made of killing and bringing to life again the
novice at initiation, there may exist or have existed not only a belief in
the possibility of permanently depositing the soul in some external
object—animal, plant, or what not—but an actual intention of so doing. If
the question is put, why do men desire to deposit their life outside their
bodies? the answer can only be that, like the giant in the fairy tale,
they think it safer to do so than to carry it about with them, just as
people deposit their money with a banker rather than carry it on their
persons. We have seen that at critical periods the life or soul is
sometimes temporarily stowed away in a safe place till the danger is past.
But institutions like totemism are not resorted to merely on special
occasions of danger; they are systems into which every one, or at least
every male, is obliged to be initiated at a certain period of life. Now
the period of life at which initiation takes place is regularly puberty;
and this fact suggests that the special danger which totemism and systems
like it are intended to obviate is supposed not to arise till sexual
maturity has been attained, in fact, that the danger apprehended is
believed to attend the relation of the sexes to each other. It would be
easy to prove by a long array of facts that the sexual relation is
associated in the primitive mind with many serious perils; but the exact
nature of the danger apprehended is still obscure. We may hope that a more
exact acquaintance with savage modes of thought will in time disclose this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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