The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
History
The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)
Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
Drama, Medieval -- History and criticism; Theater -- History -- Medieval, 500-1500
the whole Kelto-Teutonic group, of the underlying institutions
of ritual and of the fundamental theological conceptions[354].
I am aware that it is no longer permissible to sum up all the
facts of European civilization in an Aryan formula. Ethnology has
satisfactorily established the existence on the continent of at least
two important racial strains besides that of the blonde invader from
Latham-land[355]. But I do not think that any of the attempts hitherto
made to distinguish Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in folk-lore have
met with any measure of success[356]. Nor is it quite clear that any
such distinction need have been implied by the difference of blood.
Archaeologists speak of a remarkable uniformity of material culture
throughout the whole of Europe during the neolithic period; and there
appears to be no special reason why this uniformity may not have
extended to the comparatively simple notions which man was led to form
of the not-man by his early contacts with his environment. In any case
the social amalgamation of Aryan and pre-Aryan was a process already
complete by the Middle Ages; and for the purpose of this investigation
it seems justifiable, and in the present state of knowledge even
necessary, to treat the village customs as roughly speaking homogeneous
throughout the whole of the Kelto-Teutonic area.
An analysis of these customs suggests a mental history somewhat as
follows. The first relations of man to the not-man are, it need hardly
be said, of a practical rather than a sentimental or a philosophic
character. They arise out of an endeavour to procure certain goods
which depend, in part at least, upon natural processes beyond man’s
own control. The chief of these goods is, of course, food; that is to
say, in a primitive state of civilization, success in hunting, whether
of berries, mussels and ‘witchetty grubs,’ or of more elusive and
difficult game; and later, when hunting ceases to be the mainstay of
existence, the continued fertility of the flocks and herds, which form
the support of a pastoral race, and of the cornfields and orchards
which in their turn come to supplement these, on the appearance of
agriculture. Food once supplied, the little tale of primitive man’s
limited conception of the desirable is soon completed. Fire and a
roof-tree are his already. But he asks for physical health, for
success in love and in the begetting of offspring, and for the power
to anticipate by divination that future about which he is always so
childishly curious. In the pursuit, then, of these simple goods man
endeavours to control nature. But his earliest essays in this direction
are, as Dr. Frazer has recently pointed out, not properly to be called
religion[357]. The magical charms by which he attempts to make the
sun burn, and the waters fall, and the wind blow as it pleases him,
certainly do not imply that recognition of a quasi-human personality
outside himself, which any religious definition may be supposed to
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