Pagan and Christian Creeds [28]
witnesses a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not, it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same part oneself--a sympathetic pain. What more natural than to suppose that the pain really is transferred from the one person to the other? and how easy the inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or their sins atoned for?
Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus, curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy. Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world outside.
Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with red zigzags of lightning[1]; but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as, for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track of elementary Science. And so he made "bull- roarers" to imitate the sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and thunder- drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus[2]; but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient Greece, and Africa."
[1] See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
[2] Themis, p. 61.
Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit.[1] To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible,[2] he would cut himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the raingod was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be abundant."[3] Sometimes he, the rain-maker,
Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus, curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy. Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world outside.
Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with red zigzags of lightning[1]; but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as, for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track of elementary Science. And so he made "bull- roarers" to imitate the sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and thunder- drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus[2]; but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient Greece, and Africa."
[1] See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
[2] Themis, p. 61.
Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit.[1] To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible,[2] he would cut himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the raingod was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be abundant."[3] Sometimes he, the rain-maker,