| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
§ 9. The Magic
Spring |
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| THE GENERAL
explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and many
similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin,
magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring.
The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were
imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true
causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce
the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only
to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic
influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or mountain dell, on desert plain or
wind-swept shore, would be taken up and repeated by mightier actors
on a vaster stage. He fancied that by masquerading in leaves and
flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and
that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy
season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning
spring. If we find it hard to throw ourselves even in fancy into a
mental condition in which such things seem possible, we can more
easily picture to ourselves the anxiety which the savage, when he
first began to lift his thoughts above the satisfaction of his
merely animal wants, and to meditate on the causes of things, may
have felt as to the continued operation of what we now call the laws
of nature. To us, familiar as we are with the conception of the
uniformity and regularity with which the great cosmic phenomena
succeed each other, there seems little ground for apprehension that
the causes which produce these effects will cease to operate, at
least within the near future. But this confidence in the stability
of nature is bred only by the experience which comes of wide
observation and long tradition; and the savage, with his narrow
sphere of observation and his short-lived tradition, lacks the very
elements of that experience which alone could set his mind at rest
in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature.
No wonder, therefore, that he is thrown into a panic by an eclipse,
and thinks that the sun or the moon would surely perish, if he did
not raise a clamour and shoot his puny shafts into the air to defend
the luminaries from the monster who threatens to devour them. No
wonder he is terrified when in the darkness of night a streak of sky
is suddenly illumined by the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse
of the celestial arch glows with the fitful light of the Northern
Streamers. Even phenomena which recur at fixed and uniform intervals
may be viewed by him with apprehension, before he has come to
recognise the orderliness of their recurrence. The speed or slowness
of his recognition of such periodic or cyclic changes in nature will
depend largely on the length of the particular cycle. The cycle, for
example, of day and night is everywhere, except in the polar
regions, so short and hence so frequent that men probably soon
ceased to discompose themselves seriously as to the chance of its
failing to recur, though the ancient Egyptians, as we have seen,
daily wrought enchantments to bring back to the east in the morning
the fiery orb which had sunk at evening in the crimson west. But it
was far otherwise with the annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a
year is a considerable period, seeing that the number of our years
is but few at the best. To the primitive savage, with his short
memory and imperfect means of marking the flight of time, a year may
well have been so long that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at
all, and watched the changing aspects of earth and heaven with a
perpetual wonder, alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast
down, according as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and
animal life, ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence.
In autumn when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by the nipping blast, and he looked up at the
bare boughs, could he feel sure that they would ever be green again?
As day by day the sun sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be
certain that the luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even
the waning moon, whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every
night over the rim of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his
mind a fear lest, when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons
no more. |
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| These and a thousand such misgivings may have
thronged the fancy and troubled the peace of the man who first began
to reflect on the mysteries of the world he lived in, and to take
thought for a more distant future than the morrow. It was natural,
therefore, that with such thoughts and fears he should have done all
that in him lay to bring back the faded blossom to the bough, to
swing the low sun of winter up to his old place in the summer sky,
and to restore its orbed fulness to the silver lamp of the waning
moon. We may smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was
only by making a long series of experiments, of which some were
almost inevitably doomed to failure, that man learned from
experience the futility of some of his attempted methods and the
fruitfulness of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing
but experiments which have failed and which continue to be repeated
merely because, for reasons which have already been indicated, the
operator is unaware of their failure. With the advance of knowledge
these ceremonies either cease to be performed altogether or are kept
up from force of habit long after the intention with which they were
instituted has been forgotten. Thus fallen from their high estate,
no longer regarded as solemn rites on the punctual performance of
which the welfare and even the life of the community depend, they
sink gradually to the level of simple pageants, mummeries, and
pastimes, till in the final stage of degeneration they are wholly
abandoned by older people, and, from having once been the most
serious occupation of the sage, become at last the idle sport of
children. It is in this final stage of decay that most of the old
magical rites of our European forefathers linger on at the present
day, and even from this their last retreat they are fast being swept
away by the rising tide of those multitudinous forces, moral,
intellectual, and social, which are bearing mankind onward to a new
and unknown goal. We may feel some natural regret at the
disappearance of quaint customs and picturesque ceremonies, which
have preserved to an age often deemed dull and prosaic something of
the flavour and freshness of the olden time, some breath of the
springtime of the world; yet our regret will be lessened when we
remember that these pretty pageants, these now innocent diversions,
had their origin in ignorance and superstition; that if they are a
record of human endeavour, they are also a monument of fruitless
ingenuity, of wasted labour, and of blighted hopes; and that for all
their gay trappings—their flowers, their ribbons, and their
music—they partake far more of tragedy than of farce. |
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| The interpretation which, following in the footsteps
of W. Mannhardt, I have attempted to give
of these ceremonies has been not a little confirmed by the
discovery, made since this book was first written, that the natives
of Central Australia regularly practise magical ceremonies for the
purpose of awakening the dormant energies of nature at the approach
of what may be called the Australian spring. Nowhere apparently are
the alternations of the seasons more sudden and the contrasts
between them more striking than in the deserts of Central Australia,
where at the end of a long period of drought the sandy and stony
wilderness, over which the silence and desolation of death appear to
brood, is suddenly, after a few days of torrential rain, transformed
into a landscape smiling with verdure and peopled with teeming
multitudes of insects and lizards, of frogs and birds. The
marvellous change which passes over the face of nature at such times
has been compared even by European observers to the effect of magic;
no wonder, then, that the savage should regard it as such in very
deed. Now it is just when there is promise of the approach of a good
season that the natives of Central Australia are wont especially to
perform those magical ceremonies of which the avowed intention is to
multiply the plants and animals they use as food. These ceremonies,
therefore, present a close analogy to the spring customs of our
European peasantry not only in the time of their celebration, but
also in their aim; for we can hardly doubt that in instituting rites
designed to assist the revival of plant life in spring our primitive
forefathers were moved, not by any sentimental wish to smell at
early violets, or pluck the rathe primrose, or watch yellow
daffodils dancing in the breeze, but by the very practical
consideration, certainly not formulated in abstract terms, that the
life of man is inextricably bound up with that of plants, and that
if they were to perish he could not survive. And as the faith of the
Australian savage in the efficacy of his magic rites is confirmed by
observing that their performance is invariably followed, sooner or
later, by that increase of vegetable and animal life which it is
their object to produce, so, we may suppose, it was with European
savages in the olden time. The sight of the fresh green in brake and
thicket, of vernal flowers blowing on mossy banks, of swallows
arriving from the south, and of the sun mounting daily higher in the
sky, would be welcomed by them as so many visible signs that their
enchantments were indeed taking effect, and would inspire them with
a cheerful confidence that all was well with a world which they
could thus mould to suit their wishes. Only in autumn days, as
summer slowly faded, would their confidence again be dashed by
doubts and misgivings at symptoms of decay, which told how vain were
all their efforts to stave off for ever the approach of winter and
of death. |
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