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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

The Evolution of Religion and Myth

The Evolution of Religion and Myth

(1) Religion is the effort of the human mind to make truce with the phenomena, or, later, the problems that press in upon it, mysterious or half-understood. And primitive man has naturally but a limited horizon. The stocks and stones that obstruct him or aid him in his hunt for food are at first more real and immediate to him than the sun or stars, or heaven, or the ancestry he has hidden away in the earth. Out of them he makes his tools and weapons, and as rocks and mountains, or as forests, they bar his way to the satisfaction of his appetite. And where the struggle for life is in its essence one for bare subsistence, these are supreme over all phenomena and conditions. We need not hesitate, then, to accept fetichism as the primal religious attitude of the human mind, the system that deifies anything that comes to hand.

(2) And this is confirmed by the evidence of childhood, that rough, shorthand record of primeval history. The first attitude of the infantile mind to things is almost the same as its attitude to living beings. Long before the time of dolls it resents the wounds that things seem to inflict, and accepts their aid as benignant. Everything that enters its narrow sphere is dealt with as alive, to be punished or rewarded, like its nurse or its mother. It, in short, transfers its own personality to all the phenomena that come within page 114the range of its senses. And those that seem powerful to hurt or confer benefits are to it as gods.

(3) As the world of the child and the primitive man expands their Olympus expands too. The moving, shifting phenomena around them, the fountains, the streams, the waves, the raindrops, the mists, the trees, and flowers and the animals, are sources of wonderthat mother of both religion and philosophy. They seem to have personality and life, and can confer and withhold favours. They are not mere symbols and representatives of gods, but very gods themselves. This is the worship of the lesser features of Nature.

(4) Still the horizon widens, and the great and impressive processes of Nature, the storm and the tide, the thunder and the earthquake, add omnipotence to their idea of deity. No less living and real seem these sublime phenomena than the features of their landscape and life, that have been familiar friends as well as divinities to them. And their religious thoughts begin to fix even on the less mobile sublimities of Nature, the heaven above and its stars, the moonlight and the sun. Still though these seem to be, their vastitude strikes the imagination, and induces awe. Hence comes a loftier type of reverence and religion.

(5) And perhaps before this, perhaps contemporaneously with it, death has left its solemn inspiration on the threshold of the soul. Led by his twin-brother, sleep, with his dream retinue, he erects shrines for those who have passed away, and makes them still-living divinities. The spirit in visions of the night seems to wander far from its physical tenement. And when the eyes close in the final sleep, and the great darkness comes, the same thing occurs: the spirit has gone a long journey; it must have commissariat and retinue; and food is offered on the grave, and slaves and even wives are sacrificed, that they may accompany it on its way. page 115Hence the warmer and more human religion of ancestry-worship, with its tales of the past and its genealogies.

(6) From this the personal element creeps into the Nature-worships. Personification of the lesser and greater features and processes of existence arises. Allegorical story and legend gather round the names of the Nature-deities. They become living flesh and blood like the worshippers themselves. They love and hate, wrangle and scold, war and make treaties; they eat each other, if their makers are cannibals; they are as gross or as cultured as their clientle, as criminal or immoral, as imaginative or intellectual. They are "touched with like passions." The only difference between a tribe's or nation's pantheon and its own life is that the gods are stronger or greater or less subject to accident, and can elude one or more of the senses.

(7) Some of the ancestral spirits, the great and heroic, join them. And thus the line grows difficult to draw between the home of the gods in the sky and the home of the spirits of men in the darkness beneath the earth. Yet there is ever an upper world and an under world beyond the immediate ken of the senses.

(8) A final stage of primitive religion is the philosophical. The mind begins to work on its own creations, and in trying to find out the origin of the world as it is, has also to account for the gods, their state, and relationships to the world. This is the cosmology of a religion, and is a sign that the race in its higher intellects is about to break away from the trammels of the old faith, and to rise above it. It is out of this that monotheism grows, if the tribal divisions have reached any national unity under a ruler. If there is no monarchical government as a model, philosophy gradually rejects Olympus, and accepts the world of common sense, or a world of mystic meaning in its place.