The New Stone Age in Northern Europe Part 10

We have spoken of them as pioneers. It was a time and place of pioneer, frontier life. And frontier men and life have their peculiar physical, cultural, mental, and temperamental characteristics, almost apart from time and place. The people have something, at least, in common with the great American westward migrations and frontiersmen of a far later date.

We have the successive waves of hunters, herdsmen, and farmers often overlapping or mingling. We have a grand mixing of peoples and cultures, if not of races. Many a fine art or technique is left behind. Life is rude, hard, vigorous, vital, joyous. It was so yesterday, it was probably so millennia ago. For the stratum of frontiersman and barbarian--not to say savage--lies just below the surface in us all, and a scratch exposes it. This was a period of vitality, hope, and promise.

CHAPTER X

NEOLITHIC RELIGION

Man's ancestors, as we have seen, owed their progress to their training, policing, and hara.s.sing by stronger and better-armed compet.i.tors. The earliest vertebrates developed a notochordal rod of cartilage, and then a backbone, by the habit of swimming forced upon them by the mollusks and crustacea which held the rich feeding-grounds of the ocean bottom along the sh.o.r.es. In early Paleozoic time the sharks crowded the ganoids in successive waves toward and into fresh water, until finally some crawled out on the sh.o.r.e as amphibia.

Land life and air-breathing gave the possibility of warm blood and high development of brain, and a strong tendency toward viviparous and finally intrauterine development of the embryo. Reptiles hara.s.sed mammals into the attainment of a certain amount of wariness and intelligence. The comparatively weak Primates were kept in the trees and forced to develop hand and brain by the fierce and well-armed Carnivora. Only a "saving remnant" has progressed, and these mostly under stern and strenuous pressure. The "aspiring" ape exists only in our imagination.

The apes had become accustomed to life in the trees, and found it safe and comfortable. A change of climate compelled those dwelling farthest north to seek their living on the ground. Most of them fled southward, many became extinct, a few came down and adapted themselves to the new mode of life. Nature was in no sense a "fairy G.o.d-mother" to them, but a stern, harsh disciplinarian whose method of education was "not a word and a blow and the blow first, but the blow without the word, leaving the pupil to find out why his ears had been boxed"[155]; and nature's cuffs were frequently fatal. The pupil had to learn by others'

experience. Paleolithic man lived in France poorly armed and ill-protected against a threatening climate steadily changing for the worse. Food may have been abundant, but enemies hunting for him were also numerous. He was compelled to be keen, watchful, prying, wary; to discover distant danger, and to notice every trace of its approach. He learned the habits and behavior of animals, and the ways of things--an excellent course of study. He had to rely on his wits, and they were none too keen or many.

Some things he could understand: he learned to avoid or to ward off many dangers. Others seemed altogether beyond his understanding or control.

Here he could only wonder; but the wise old Greeks knew that wonder was the mother of wisdom. He wondered at storm, lightning, hail, and flood; at disease and death, and a hundred other things. He sat in the mouth of his cave and watched that strange creature fire devouring the wood and sending smoke and sparks skyward. He thought a very little in a dull, stupid way, dozed and dreamed and awaked to wonder again. Or he saw fire raging through the forest and fled for his life. But it was warming and fascinating, and somehow akin to himself. Did it not devour wood and lap up water on the hearth?

He seems to have come to feel rather than recognize that he was surrounded by invisible powers, in some respects like himself but vastly more powerful, who knew what he was doing, and who would hurt him if he did certain things and might help him if he did others. Certain places were to be strictly avoided, certain objects must not be touched, certain things must never be done, or could be permitted only at certain times. They were taboo. He has started on a long journey of exploration, experiment, and discovery.

How had he come to believe this? Largely through hard experience of nature's buffets, whenever he acted contrary to this hypothesis or feeling. His religion was largely one of fear fitted for a savage mind, though not without a mingling of hope.

Of course in us cultured folk perfect love, sentimentality, softness of fibre, heedlessness, forgetfulness, and general superficiality of life--to make a very inadequate list--have combined to cast out fear, "for fear hath torment"; and we thank G.o.d loudly that we are so much wiser than our benighted ancestors. Even our New England fathers feared G.o.d, though they feared nothing else, but we fear only everything else except G.o.d and law. But the unlucky scientific wight living and working in the shadow of adamantine law remains in hopeless bondage to fear.

"Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen Gesetzen Mussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden."[156]

These great powers might not necessarily be hopelessly hostile. They might be appeased or won over, possibly controlled. What could he do to please them? For something must be done. Here ritual arises.[157]

Possibly he offers to one or more of them a share in the feast which he so much enjoys after a successful hunt. In time this may become a sacrifice, sent up and out on the wings of fire.[158] Or he practises a wind or rain dance as the outlet and expression of his intense desire; and to awaken, encourage, and help the powers of these elements. He holds a hunting-dance to rehea.r.s.e and gain power for the killing of the bear. Call it objectification of his heart's desire, or magic if you prefer. Magic and religion grow up side by side, and probably from the same root in these early stages: as alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy will spring up later.

The pictures on the cave-walls of France probably had a magical or religious purpose. Here we find very few representations of human beings. But in a rock-painting at Cogul, possibly Neolithic though probably older, we see a group of women apparently engaged in some rite of magic or religion. The occurrence of amulets also does not surprise us.

We cannot make a study of primitive ritual magic and religion, their origin, form, and content. But even our hasty glance shows us that man had been wondering and thinking about this subject during millennia before our Neolithic time, had been forced to accept many profound convictions, containing germs of sublime truth overlaid, like our own, with many errors; he had elaborated a system of ritual, and had travelled far along the road of religious experience and discoveries long before this comparatively recent epoch.

The conspicuous features of the religion of this ancient period of primeval stupidity, or _Urdummheit_, to borrow the German word, were the host of invisible powers or daemons, and the law of taboo, the forbidden thing. Breach of taboo rendered not only the individual lawbreaker but the whole tribe, however innocent, liable to punishment. The whole community was responsible for every deed of any and every one of its members, and suffered or prospered accordingly. When Agamemnon had wronged the priest of Apollo, the G.o.d shot his arrows not at Agamemnon but throughout the innocent Greek host. The children of Israel were routed at Ai, because Achan had taken the devoted or forbidden thing.

This stage of tribal responsibility seems to be practically universal.

It gave the law an iron grip on the people, tamed them, and made them march in lock-step, a necessary stage of terrible discipline. But only under the protection and stimulus of this tribal feeling of common responsibility and resulting tribal conscience could the individual conscience be gradually awakened and developed, and finally break through the cake or crust of custom into freedom and light.

All these forces and influences were acting throughout the Neolithic and later periods, and are still with us. Perhaps we can gain a tolerably distinct and correct view of Neolithic religion among the Mediterranean peoples by a glance at the ancient Greek mysteries.

Students of Greek art and literature quite naturally have been very slow to take interest in these crude, often ugly and indecent, rituals. But for this very reason the primitive stands out all the more sharply defined against the brilliant, beautiful, artistic Olympian religion of Greek art and literature, and particularly of Homer. Students like Professor Murray could hardly be expected to explore these lower strata with great sympathy. For this very reason, as somewhat unwilling witnesses to whatever is good or great in primitive Greek ritual, their testimony is all the more valuable, though probably hardly as just as that of Miss Harrison.[159] We shall follow mainly Professor Murray's vivid portrayal.[160] In his _Saturnia Regna_ he pictures the ritual and belief of the ancient Greeks before the arrival of Achaeans or h.e.l.lenes in any strict sense of the word. Strictly speaking, it is a description of the religion of the Bronze Age during the earlier part of the second millennium B. C.

It has been growing, developing, and undergoing modifications since Neolithic time, but in all its essential features it is ancient.

We find here very few traces of the chief Olympian divinities, which belong to a later age than the objects of worship or cult of these ancient peoples whom we venture to call Pelasgi. They worshipped powers or daemons in indefinite numbers, but with no individual names: represented, if at all, by emblems or symbols, very rarely in bodily human form. Of these spirits of death, disease, madness, and calamity there were "thousands upon thousands, from whom man can never escape or hide." So much is mainly a heritage from Paleolithic times. But the conception of spirit has grown more clear, distinct, and elevated, as we saw in our study of burial rites.

But Neolithic men lived in communities and devoted themselves largely to tillage of the ground and to raising sheep, goats, swine, and cattle.

Their life was still precarious. "Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of agricultural works, which like most cruelty had its roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo--the 'Forbidden Thing.'"

Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal responsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or magician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable sense of sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality toward the spirit world is now appearing in a religion previously almost or quite unmoral.

We may easily overestimate the extent and power of the change, but we can hardly be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal possibilities of this dim feeling or conception.

In agriculture and throughout nature seed-time was followed by harvest, fall, and winter's gloom and death. Then in the next spring there was a return, a rebirth or a resurrection. If the seed failed to come up, if the blade withered or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit or daemon had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the forbidden thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they must help the spirit.

Hence there must be every year a time of purification, of renovation, when the old garments and utensils and everything which could carry the pollution of death were cast off or cleansed.

All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance to which we will return later, are expressed or symbolized in the great Dromena, festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may call these rites of pre-Homeric Greece. Then, for a time, they are partially, though never totally, eclipsed, by the brilliant beauty of the Olympian religion with its glorious temples, statues, and other works of art.

The Olympian G.o.ds had conquered the world. They practise neither agriculture nor industry, nor any honest work. They fight and feast and drink and play. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. The Olympian religion had its time and place, and did its work. It swept out many indecent features of the older cults, many superst.i.tions and abuses. It suited the Achaeans and their civilization exactly, and we can never forget its "sheer beauty," But it went bankrupt, lost its hold on men's minds and hearts, failed and faded out. Professor Murray compares its end to that of a garden of rare exotic flowers overrun by the rank weeds which it had temporarily displaced. Miss Harrison more justly compares it to a flower withering because cut off from its roots.

There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols and chaos of conceptions than in the ordered and artistic Olympian hierarchy with its marvellous representations of the G.o.ds in human or superhuman form and beauty. Even its art and literature could not save it. It had lost its mysticism. The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost beyond recognition, like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale. It returned triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vitality and adaptability.

Plato draws his finest ill.u.s.trations from its mysteries, out of which, also, the Greek drama arose. Paul quotes from them or from a similar stratum of belief.

Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It was rooted in the firm conviction of the existence of a spiritual world toward and into which its every rootlet was forcing its way and from which it drew nourishment and power. We might better change the ill.u.s.tration and say that it was slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in response to the higher pulsations. By patient experiment and experience, which produced a hope that could not make ashamed and a faith in which hope and experiment combined, it was feeling its way into spiritual knowledge. It knew nothing of practical science or of material cause and effect. But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-breaking. It had a tribal conscience and recognized the need of purification. It had the promise, at least, of individual conscience and consciousness of sin.

Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner of the veil and left an abundant opportunity for wonder, imagination, thought, and mysticism, which was entirely lacking in the perfect statue and the finished creed. It made man, through its sympathetic magic, a coworker with his divinities or daemons in gaining the answer to an intensive desire or prayer acted by all the members of the community with all their united might, instead of expressed merely in words, the utterance of his whole being and life. Such a system or chaos overflows with sublime possibilities.

The introduction of agriculture had produced another most important change in religious views and ritual. In tillage the earth brought forth and gave birth to the crops which furnished their chief food supply, and probably, in their view, to animals and men also; just as the human mother gives birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief in, and cult of, an earth divinity, of course female, or in a G.o.ddess or daemon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accompanied by a male partner, companion or son, but he occupies a lower place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FEMALE IDOLS, THRACE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FEMALE IDOL, ANAU

Reproduced from "Explorations in Turkestan." Carnegie Inst.i.tute of Washington, Publishers.]

This cult of the G.o.ddess seems to have been a marked feature of Neolithic religion.[161] We find it in the remains of the Minoan periods in Crete; Isis and her companion G.o.d Osiris were very prominent in Egypt. The cult was wide-spread throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better Artemis, of the Ephesians, Ma in Anatolia, the great G.o.ddess of the Hitt.i.tes are a few examples. Farther eastward we find Astarte. Pumpelly found a female idol (Astarte?) at Anau. The cult dots, if it does not cover, the old middle migration route. We remember the wide-spread distribution of the painted pottery from Susa to Anau and over to Boghaz-keui in the land of the Hitt.i.tes. Art and religion are closely related during the early times and a wide-spread type of art suggests, though it does not prove, an accompanying form of religion similar throughout the same wide area. In Greece we find Demeter, and in "Pelasgic Athens" the G.o.ddess Athena always held the highest place. Hera may well have been another great G.o.ddess of the Pelasgi. When the conquering Achaeans came in and their chieftains wedded the princesses of the land, they married their G.o.d Zeus to the G.o.ddess of the land. Hence this cult has been displaced and its records blotted out by later changes. That so many traces of it outlasted the Bronze Age is a proof of its firm hold and great vitality.

We have studied these ancient cults in Greece and the Mediterranean basin because here they are easily discovered and can be restored. They are covered by only a thin layer of later cults which could not destroy their vitality. When we attempt to explore northern Europe the situation is quite different. Christianity blotted out all traces of the worship of Odin and Thor; what it could not blot out it took over into its own service in a modified form. Behind Thor and Odin we see the shadowy form of Dyaus (Ziu?), perhaps a sky-G.o.d akin to the h.e.l.lenic Zeus, whose name has come down to us in our weekday, Tuesday. Behind all these we must search for traces of the deeply buried and almost obliterated genuine Neolithic cults. These traces could persist only as superst.i.tions of peasants.

We notice first of all that we find one race extending northward along the coast of France into England and Denmark, the zone of the megalithic monuments. In this zone we find figurines and carvings of divinities.

Here Dechelette tells us that the female divinity was undoubtedly preferred as the guardian of the tombs.[162] This zone was so closely connected with the Mediterranean region that we should expect nothing else.

In southeastern Europe, around the valley of the Danube, at Cucuteni, Jablanica, and elsewhere, we find figurines, and here again the female divinity is at least the more prominent, if not decidedly dominant.[163] Dechelette tells us as to its source: "From the earliest times striking a.n.a.logies have been proven between the old villages of the Danube and the Balkans and the aegean settlements of the Troad and Phrygia. Primitive idols, painted pottery, frequent employment of the spiral in decorative art: all these occur scattered through the stations of southeastern Europe in Neolithic times and in the eastern Mediterranean basin in pre-Mycenaean and Mycenaean days. Between Butmir (near Sarajevo, Bosnia) and Hissarlik (Troy) these discoveries mark the routes which without doubt were already opening communication between the pre-h.e.l.lenic peoples and the pre-Celtic tribes." Reinach adds: "Eastern Europe, part of Asia Minor and of Egypt, have been revealed as very intense centres of Neolithic civilization."[164] They may be traced in rare examples still farther northward into Bohemia and even in Thuringia. But their distribution outside of southeastern Europe is very spa.r.s.e. Traces of the worship of an earth mother,[165] though vague and few, can still be discovered in the superst.i.tions of the peasant folk of northern Germany. A primitive belief in spirits of the earth, of vegetation, of fertility--of daemons who preside over the crops, who die in the autumn or winter and reappear in the spring--is common in the folk-lore and customs of the peasants in many parts of Europe. Our Maypole has an interesting history and is probably the last survival of an ancient cult. Still other more interesting ill.u.s.trations might easily be cited.[166]

The Balder-myth is familiar to us all. He is a "rare exotic," entirely out of place in that circle of berserker G.o.ds and brutal giants who lived in or over against the Norse Valhalla, but would have found himself at home in the land and times of Dionysus. Have we possibly here an intrusion of a far more ancient religious element which even the rude dwellers in a harsh Northland could not forget, and would not allow to die?

Usually accompanying the cult of the G.o.ddess we find frequent and wide-spread traces of a related trend of thought, mother-right (Mutterrecht), maternal kinship, matriarchy: under which were generally included the reckoning of descent in the female line, rights of inheritance by the daughter, hence female rights of property and general high social and economic position of woman. These features need not be united--they may appear separately, one here and another there. We are probably not studying a system of thought or law, but a general tendency of life.[167]

Mother-right, to use the most general term, survived, partially at least, down to historic time in Egypt. It persisted in Asia Minor.

Perhaps it crops out in the story of the Amazons. We find traces of it in ancient law and custom in northern Europe. Says h.o.e.rnes: "Among the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, and Slavs, remains of mother-right occur even in historic times."[168] Wundt thinks that maternal kinship was once universal.[169] We have no time or room to discuss the origin of mother-kinship. We may yet find that it and mother-right represent distinct forms of a deep-seated universal tendency, often of independent origin, occurring usually together but sometimes separate.

Something akin to mother-right, and to a high position and dominating influence of woman in the family and in society, is only what we should expect at this time. We have seen that women were the first great discoverers and inventors; discoverers and founders of all our household arts and crafts as well as of most of our science. Women were the first spinners and weavers, the first potters. They were the first herbalists and botanists and the first household physicians. In the care of the children they were compelled to be alert, quick-minded, ready for all sorts of emergencies. Paleolithic man was a mere hunter; the rest of the time he ate and loafed. The woman provided the vegetable food, as well as much of the animal, and became the first gardener or farmer. She introduced tillage of the ground, and thus became economically by far the more important member of the partnership, and she probably had by far the more alert, quick-witted brain.

The establishment of agriculture was followed by the cult of the earth-mother, who gave birth to all the fruits of the ground and probably to all life. The G.o.ddess, with or without a male companion, was the head of the hierarchy. This again could not have been without its influence. Says Miss Harrison: "Woman to primitive man is a thing at once weak and magical, to be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of child-bearing denied to man, powers only half understood, sources of attraction but also of danger and repulsion, forces that all over the world seem to fill him with dim terror. The att.i.tude of man to woman and, though perhaps to a less degree, of woman to man is still essentially magical. Man cannot escape being born of woman: but he can, and if he is wise he will, as soon as he comes to manhood, perform ceremonies of riddance and purgation."[170]

One other fact deserves notice. In times of dearth the savage man always eats up all the grain reserved as seed for the next year, and there is none to sow. This is the rock on which attempts to introduce agriculture among savages or nomads have usually been shipwrecked. Here the priest, or perhaps priestess, of the G.o.ddess came to her aid, armed with the weapon of taboo. Against this alliance the poor, stupid, clumsy, and slow-witted Neolithic man struggled in vain. He could vent his fury by pulling his wife about by the hair, but this availed little or naught.

He had to submit and be resigned.

Female magic increases in power as we approach the frontier and frontier life. At the fall of the Roman Empire northern tribes swept away the old civilization. Gra.s.s grew in the ruined cities, only villages remained inhabited. The priests, by a liberal preaching of h.e.l.l and other dire torments, attempted to subdue these barbarians to law and to introduce order. Agriculture and industry rearose or returned slowly. Finally after the "dark ages" great cathedrals sprang up, dedicated not to apostles or martyrs but to the Virgin, Queen of Heaven. Mr. Adams tells us that at this time the women of France were the real leaders. Is this apparent parallelism mere chance, or is it due to a certain amount of similarity in conditions?

Some one has said that our Neolithic ancestors, especially the megalith-builders, were priest-ridden. If he had added that they were tamed and led, and very possibly diligently hen-pecked, by a veritable matriarchate, I suspect that he would have discovered and correctly estimated the two great sources of their marvellous progress. For at this stage, as at some others, the priests and the women were the elite, and the government was, therefore, ideal for its day.