| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
XXIII. Our Debt to the Savage |
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| IT would be easy to extend the list of
royal and priestly taboos, but the instances collected in the
preceding pages may suffice as specimens. To conclude this part of
our subject it only remains to state summarily the general
conclusions to which our enquiries have thus far conducted us. We
have seen that in savage or barbarous society there are often found
men to whom the superstition of their fellows ascribes a controlling
influence over the general course of nature. Such men are
accordingly adored and treated as gods. Whether these human
divinities also hold temporal sway over the lives and fortunes of
their adorers, or whether their functions are purely spiritual and
supernatural, in other words, whether they are kings as well as gods
or only the latter, is a distinction which hardly concerns us here.
Their supposed divinity is the essential fact with which we have to
deal. In virtue of it they are a pledge and guarantee to their
worshippers of the continuance and orderly succession of those
physical phenomena upon which mankind depends for subsistence.
Naturally, therefore, the life and health of such a god-man are
matters of anxious concern to the people whose welfare and even
existence are bound up with his; naturally he is constrained by them
to conform to such rules as the wit of early man has devised for
averting the ills to which flesh is heir, including the last ill,
death. These rules, as an examination of them has shown, are nothing
but the maxims with which, on the primitive
view, every man of common prudence must comply if he would live long
in the land. But while in the case of ordinary men the observance of
the rules is left to the choice of the individual, in the case of
the god-man it is enforced under penalty of dismissal from his high
station, or even of death. For his worshippers have far too great a
stake in his life to allow him to play fast and loose with it.
Therefore all the quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the
venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated
long ago, and which old women at chimney corners still impart as
treasures of great price to their descendants gathered round the
cottage fire on winter evenings—all these antique fancies clustered,
all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path of the old
king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in the toils
of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom,
“light as air but strong as links of iron,” that crossing and
recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a
network of observances from which death or deposition alone could
release him. |
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| Thus to students of the past the life of the old
kings and priests teems with instruction. In it was summed up all
that passed for wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect
pattern after which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless
model constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by
a barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem
to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical
consistency. Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a
tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the
living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system
of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly
complete and harmonious whole. The flaw—and it is a fatal one—of the
system lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its
conception of the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the
conclusions which it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise
these premises as ridiculous because we can easily detect their
falseness, would be ungrateful as well as unphilosophical. We stand
upon the foundation reared by the generations that have gone before,
and we can but dimly realise the painful and prolonged efforts which
it has cost humanity to struggle up to the point, no very exalted
one after all, which we have reached. Our gratitude is due to the
nameless and forgotten toilers, whose patient thought and active
exertions have largely made us what we are. The amount of new
knowledge which one age, certainly which one man, can add to the
common store is small, and it argues stupidity or dishonesty,
besides ingratitude, to ignore the heap while vaunting the few
grains which it may have been our privilege to add to it. There is
indeed little danger at present of undervaluing the contributions
which modern times and even classical antiquity have made to the
general advancement of our race. But when we pass these limits, the
case is different. Contempt and ridicule or abhorrence and
denunciation are too often the only
recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the
benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many,
perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our
resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our
differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and
deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage
forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us
by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to
regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune
which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those
who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being
regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of
their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and
enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted
for much of what we thought most our own, and that their errors were
not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply
hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were
propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be
inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and
rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all,
what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work
best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder
ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their
errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give
them the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day
stand in need of: cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi
sunt. |
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