Modern Mythology Part 13

So far, fetishism is spiritualism.

Civilised 'Fetishism'

De Brosses did not look among civilised fetishists for the motives which he neglected among savages (i. 196). Tant pis pour monsieur le President. But we and our method no more stand or fall with De Brosses and his, than Mr. Max Muller's etymologies stand or fall with those in the Cratylus of Plato. If, in a civilised people, ancient or modern, we find a practice vaguely styled 'fetishistic,' we examine it in its details. While we have talismans, amulets, gamblers' fetiches, I do not think that, except among some children, we have anything nearly a.n.a.logous to Gold Coast fetishism as a whole. Some one seems to have called the palladium a fetish. I don't exactly know what the palladium (called a fetish by somebody) was. The hasta fetialis has been styled a fetish--an apparent abuse of language. As to the Holy Cross qua fetish, why discuss such free-thinking credulities?

Modern anthropologists--Tylor, Frazer, and the rest--are not under the censure appropriate to the illogical.

More Mischiefs of Comparison

The 'Nemesis' (i. 196) of De Brosses' errors did not stay in her ravaging progress. Fetishism was represented as 'the very beginning of religion,'

first among the negroes, then among all races. As I, for one, persistently proclaim that the beginning of religion is an inscrutable mystery, the Nemesis has somehow left me scatheless, propitiated by my piety. I said, long ago, 'the train of ideas which leads man to believe in and to treasure fetishes is _one among the earliest springs_ of religious belief.' {120a} But from even this rather guarded statement I withdraw. 'No man can watch the idea of G.o.d in the making or in the beginning.' {120b}

Still more Nemesis

The new Nemesis is really that which I have just put far from me--namely, that 'modern savages represent everywhere the Eocene stratum of religion.' They _probably_ represent an _early_ stage in religion, just as, teste. Mr. Max Muller, they represent an early stage in language 'In savage languages we see what we can no longer expect to see even in the most ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. We watch the childhood of language, with all its childish pranks.' {120c}

Now, if the tongues spoken by modern savages represent the 'childhood'

and 'childish pranks' of language, why should the beliefs of modern savages not represent the childhood and childish pranks of religion? I am not here averring that they do so, nor even that Mr. Max Muller is right in _his_ remark on language. The Australian blacks have been men as long as the Prussian n.o.bility. Their language has had time to outgrow 'childish pranks,' but apparently it has not made use of its opportunities, according to our critic. Does he know why?

One need not reply to the charge that anthropologists, if they are meant, regard modern savages 'as just evolved from the earth, or the sky,' or from monkeys (i. 197). 'Savages have a far-stretching unknown history behind them.' 'The past of savages, I say, must have been a long past.'

{121} So, once more, the Nemesis of De Brosses fails to touch me--and, of course, to touch more learned anthropologists.

There is yet another Nemesis--the postulate that Aryans and Semites, or rather their ancestors, must have pa.s.sed through the savage state. Dr.

Tylor writes:--'So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation secondary. _Culture must be gained before it can be lost_.' Now a person who has not gained what Dr. Tylor calls 'culture' (_not_ in Mr. Arnold's sense) is a man without tools, instruments, or clothes. He is certainly, so far, like a savage; is very much lower in 'culture' than any race with which we are acquainted. As a matter of hypothesis, anyone may say that man was born 'with everything handsome about him.' He has then to account for the savage elements in Greek myth and rite.

For Us or Against Us?

We now hear that the worst and last penalty paid for De Brosses'

audacious comparison of savage with civilised superst.i.tions is the postulate that Aryan and Semitic peoples have pa.s.sed through a stage of savagery. 'However different the languages, customs and myths, the colour and the skulls of these modern savages might be from those of Aryan and Semitic people, the latter must once have pa.s.sed through the same stage, must once have been what the negroes of the West Coast of Africa are to-day. This postulate has not been, and, according to its very nature, cannot be proved. But the mischief done by acting on such postulates is still going on, and in several cases it has come to this--that what in historical religions, such as our own, is known to be the most modern, the very last outcome, namely, the worship of relics or a belief in amulets, has been represented as the first necessary step in the evolution of all religions' (i. 197).

I really do not know who says that the prehistoric ancestors of Aryans and Semites were once in the same stage as the 'negroes of the West Coast of Africa are to-day.' These honest fellows are well acquainted with coined money, with the use of firearms, and other resources of civilisation, and have been in touch with missionaries, Miss Kingsley, traders, and tourists. The ancestors of the Aryans and Semites enjoyed no such advantages. Mr. Max Muller does not tell us who says that they did. But that the ancestors of all mankind pa.s.sed through a stage in which they had to develop for themselves tools, languages, clothes, and inst.i.tutions, is a.s.suredly the belief of anthropologists. A race without tools, language, clothes, pottery, and social inst.i.tutions, or with these in the shape of undeveloped speech, stone knives, and 'possum or other skins, is what we call a race of savages. Such we believe the ancestors of mankind to have been--at any rate after the Fall.

Now when Mr. Max Muller began to write his book, he accepted this postulate of anthropology (i. 15). When he reached i. 197 he abandoned and denounced this postulate.

I quote his acceptance of the postulate (i. 15):--

'Even Mr. A. Lang has to admit that we have not got much beyond Fontenelle, when he wrote in the last century:

'"Why are the legends [myths] about men, beasts, and G.o.ds so wildly incredible and revolting? . . . The answer is that the earliest men were in a state of almost inconceivable ignorance and savagery, and that the Greeks inherited their myths from people in the same savage stage (en un pareil etat de sauvagerie). Look at the Kaffirs and Iroquois if you want to know what the earliest men were like, and remember that the very Iroquois and Kaffirs have a long past behind them"'--that is to say, are polite and cultivated compared to the earliest men of all.

Here is an uncompromising statement by Fontenelle of the postulate that the Greeks (an Aryan people) must have pa.s.sed through the same stage as modern savages--Kaffirs and Iroquois--now occupy. But (i. 15) Mr. Max Muller eagerly accepts the postulate:--

'There is not a word of Fontenelle's to which I should not gladly subscribe; there is no advice of his which I have not tried to follow in all my attempts to explain the myths of India and Greece by an occasional reference to Polynesian or African folklore.'

Well, if Mr. Max Muller 'gladly subscribes,' in p. 15, to the postulate of an original universal stage of savagery, whence civilised races inherit their incredibly repulsive myths, why, in pp. 197, 198, does he denounce that very postulate as not proven, not capable of being proved, very mischievous, and one of the evils resulting from our method of comparing savage and civilised rites and beliefs? I must be permitted to complain that I do not know which is Mr. Max Muller's real opinion--that given with such hearty conviction in p. 15, or that stated with no less earnestness in pp. 197, 198. I trust that I shall not be thought to magnify a mere slip of the pen. Both pa.s.sages--though, as far as I can see, self-contradictory--appear to be written with the same absence of levity. Fontenelle, I own, speaks of Greeks, not Semites, as being originally savages. But I pointed out {124} that he considered it safer to 'hedge' by making an exception of the Israelites. There is really nothing in Genesis against the contention that the naked, tool-less, mean, and frivolous Adam was a savage.

The Fallacy of 'Admits'

As the purpose of this essay is mainly logical, I may point out the existence of a fallacy not marked, I think, in handbooks of Logic. This is the fallacy of saying that an opponent 'admits' what, on the contrary, he has been the first to point out and proclaim. He is thus suggested into an att.i.tude which is the reverse of his own. Some one--I am sorry to say that I forget who he was--showed me that Fontenelle, in De l'Origine des Fables, {125a} briefly stated the anthropological theory of the origin of myths, or at least of that repulsive element in them which 'makes mythology mythological,' as Mr. Max Muller says. I was glad to have a predecessor in a past less remote than that of Eusebius of Caesarea. 'A briefer and better system of mythology,' I wrote, 'could not be devised; but the Mr. Casaubons of this world have neglected it, and even now it is beyond their comprehension.' {125b} To say this in this manner is not to '_admit_ that we have not got much beyond Fontenelle.' I do not want to get beyond Fontenelle. I want to go back to his 'forgotten common-sense,' and to apply his ideas with method and criticism to a range of materials which he did not possess or did not investigate.

Now, on p. 15, Mr. Max Muller had got as far as accepting Fontenelle; on pp. 197, 198 he burns, as it were, that to which he had 'gladly subscribed.'

Conclusion as to our Method

All this discussion of fetishes arose out of our author's selection of the subject as an example of the viciousness of our method. He would not permit us 'simply to place side by side' savage and Greek myths and customs, because it did harm (i. 195); and the harm done was proved by the Nemesis of De Brosses. Now, first, a method may be a good method, yet may be badly applied. Secondly, I have shown that the Nemesis does not attach to all of us modern anthropologists. Thirdly, I have proved (unless I am under some misapprehension, which I vainly attempt to detect, and for which, if it exists, I apologise humbly) that Mr. Max Muller, on p. 15, accepts the doctrine which he denounces on p. 197.

{126} Again, I am entirely at one with Mr. Max Muller when he says (p.

210) 'we have as yet really no scientific treatment of Shamanism.' This is a pressing need, but probably a physician alone could do the work--a physician double with a psychologist. See, however, the excellent pages in Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture, and in Mr. William James's Principles of Psychology, on 'Mediumship.'

THE RIDDLE THEORY

What the Philological Theory Needs

The great desideratum of the philological method is a proof that the 'Disease of Language,' ex hypothesi the most fertile source of myths, is a vera causa. Do simple poetical phrases, descriptive of heavenly phenomena, remain current in the popular mouth after the meanings of appellatives (Bright One, Dark One, &c.) have been forgotten, so that these appellatives become proper names--Apollo, Daphne, &c.? Mr. Max Muller seems to think some proof of this process as a vera causa may be derived from 'Folk Riddles.'

The Riddle Theory

We now come, therefore, to the author's treatment of popular riddles (devinettes), so common among savages and peasants. Their construction is simple: anything in Nature you please is described by a poetical periphrasis, and you are asked what it is. Thus Geistiblindr asks,

What is the Dark One That goes over the earth, Swallows water and wood, But is afraid of the wind? &c.

Or we find,

What is the gold spun from one window to another?