Pagan and Christian Creeds [30]
or the bit, but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse[3] (also the Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced. The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.
[1] Published originally in Le Magazine International, January 1896.
[2] See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
[3] "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. Religion, p. 119).
And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception, which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall."[1] Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day, and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human thought.
[1] See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as to our perfect comprehension of them?
And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY."[1] Once the present writer seemed to have a partial vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly
[1] Published originally in Le Magazine International, January 1896.
[2] See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
[3] "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. Religion, p. 119).
And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception, which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall."[1] Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day, and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human thought.
[1] See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as to our perfect comprehension of them?
And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY."[1] Once the present writer seemed to have a partial vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly