| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
LXIX. Farewell to Nemi |
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| WE are at the end of our enquiry, but as
often happens in the search after truth, if we have answered one
question, we have raised many more; if we have followed one track
home, we have had to pass by others that opened off it and led, or
seemed to lead, to far other goals than the sacred grove at Nemi.
Some of these paths we have followed a little way; others, if
fortune should be kind, the writer and the reader may one day pursue
together. For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and
it is time to part. Yet before we do so, we may well ask ourselves
whether there is not some more general conclusion, some lesson, if
possible, of hope and encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy
record of human error and folly which has engaged our attention in
this book. |
1 |
| If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential
similarity of man’s chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on
the other hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted
to satisfy them in different ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to
conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can
trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to
science. In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the
difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes
in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely
count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order
of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed
himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely
on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws
himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind
the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching
powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds
magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the
succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the
passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though
vastly superior to him in power. |
2 |
| But as time goes on this explanation in its turn
proves to be unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of
natural events is not determined by
immutable laws, but is to some extent variable and irregular, and
this assumption is not borne out by closer observation. On the
contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are
struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which,
wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried
on. Every great advance in knowledge has extended the sphere of
order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of apparent disorder
in the world, till now we are ready to anticipate that even in
regions where chance and confusion appear still to reign, a fuller
knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos to cosmos. Thus
the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the
mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of
nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older
standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had
only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in
the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables
us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In
short, religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced
by science. |
3 |
| But while science has this much in common with magic
that both rest on a faith in order as the underlying principle of
all things, readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded
that the order presupposed by magic differs widely from that which
forms the basis of science. The difference flows naturally from the
different modes in which the two orders have been reached. For
whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension, by
false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our
minds, the order laid down by science is derived from patient and
exact observation of the phenomena themselves. The abundance, the
solidity, and the splendour of the results already achieved by
science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in
the soundness of its method. Here at last, after groping about in
the dark for countless ages, man has hit upon a clue to the
labyrinth, a golden key that opens many locks in the treasury of
nature. It is probably not too much to say that the hope of
progress—moral and intellectual as well as material—in the future is
bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle
placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity. |
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Yet the history of thought should warn us against
concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the
best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and
final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of
science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely
hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of
thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world
and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science
are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted
its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some
more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of
looking at the phenomena—of registering the shadows on the screen—of
which we in this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an infinite
progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. We need not murmur
at the endless pursuit:
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| Fatti non foste a viver come bruti |
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| Ma per seguir virtute e
conoscenza. | |
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| Great things will come of that pursuit, though we
may not enjoy them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the
future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than shine on us.
The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science.
But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect.
For however vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the
future may have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the
sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but
relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in
which our earth swims as a speck or mote. In the ages to come man
may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses
of the winds and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have
strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or
rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles
at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by
reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the
sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which
thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which
the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They
too, like so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into
air, into thin air. |
6 |
| Without dipping so far into the future, we may
illustrate the course which thought has hitherto run by likening it
to a web woven of three different threads—the black thread of magic,
the red thread of religion, and the white thread of science, if
under science we may include those simple truths, drawn from
observation of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a
store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning,
we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and
white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet
by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the
fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer
still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web,
where religion has entered most deeply into its texture, a dark
crimson stain, which shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as
the white thread of science is woven more and more into the tissue.
To a web thus chequered and stained, thus shot with threads of
diverse hues, but gradually changing colour the farther it is
unrolled, the state of modern thought, with all its divergent aims
and conflicting tendencies, may be compared. Will the great movement
which for centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of
thought be continued in the near future? or will a reaction set in
which may arrest progress and even undo much that has been done? To
keep up our parable, what will be the colour of the web which the
Fates are now weaving on the humming loom of time? will it be white
or red? We cannot tell. A faint glimmering
light illumines the backward portion of the web. Clouds and thick
darkness hide the other end. |
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| Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark
has drooped her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the
road to Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the
Appian Way up to the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky
aflame with sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a
dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of
St. Peter’s. The sight once seen can never be forgotten, but we turn
from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side, till we
come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast
disappearing in the evening shadows. The place has changed but
little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the
sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished
and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden
Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades
above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the
wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus.
Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant
town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes.
Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria! |
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