The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose in men’s
minds. We have already indicated how easily and naturally men may have
come to associate the idea of sowing with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has
pursued the development of this association in the human mind, linking
up with it the conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed
at seedtime, the conception of a specially purified class of people to
kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a
_sacrament_, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions of the
body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial benefits.
Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of the
desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power
and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime,
and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and
misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men
which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a
common life and action. This something we may call _religion_ (Lat.
_religare_, to bind[68]). It was not a simple or logical something, it
was a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods,
about all sorts of “musts” and “must-nots.” Like all other human
matters, religion has grown. It must be clear from what has gone before
that primitive man--much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral
Mesozoic mammals--could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very
slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of
such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with
and through human association, and God has been and is still being
discovered by man.
[Illustration: Bronze Age Implements
(drawn to differing scales)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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