Rel. Stud. I, pp. 257-261.

E. G. PARRINDER
Reader in Comparative Study of Religions, University of London

THE ORIGINS OF RELIGION

Fifty years ago it was still common to put forward theories of the origins of religion, but today it takes courage and is a dubious adventure in any case. One or two American writers have ventured into the unknown. In i960 G. E. Swanson wrote The Birth of the Gods, and made questionable links between belief and social organisation, such as the claim that 'belief in reincarnation is most likely to appear in isolated or small communities with a simple social structure'. And in this country Margaret Murray, who never lacked the nerve for unusual theories, entitled almost her last book The Genesis of Religion, in 1963, and asserted, among speculations on the feelings of animals and children, that 'all students of ancient religion are well aware that the belief in a female deity long precedes that of a male deity'. But then she was a hundred years old when she wrote it. Two outstanding, though largely negative, contributions have recently appeared. Evans-Pritchard's Theories of Primitive Religion, the Owen Evans lectures for 1962, published 1965, is the complete demolition of Victorian theorists. And Mircea Eliade's article, 'The Quest for the "Origins" of Religion', in the journal History of Religions, summer 1964, covers some of the same ground and reaches comparable conclusions, but from a different angle. Both these writers ask why the Victorians were so interested in seeking the origins of religion. It was a period of many theories. Max Miiller's Essays in Comparative Methodology, one of the earliest handbooks of comparative religion, appeared in 1856. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, and Herbert Spencer's First Principles in 1862. The evolution of religion followed from the evolution of man, and its beginnings must have been beastly or illusory. In 1878 Miiller said that 'the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have been found out or exploded'. That sounds quite modern, but Keats had said much the same about the churches in 1820. The attack on religion has been long and has affected theories about it. Evans-Pritchard stresses the anti-religious bias of many of the writers on origins. 'The persons whose writings have been most influential have been at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists.' Anthropologists thought

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religion to be absurd, 'and it is so to most anthropologists of yesterday and today'. Hence they sought the beginnings of religion, or speculated about primitive forms of religion, with the firm conviction that it was all illusion. They inherited the optimistic rationalism of the eighteenth-century French writers, holding that religion is the exploitation of the ignorant by cunning priests and tyrannical rulers, that if the superstitions were removed bad institutions would collapse and human folly disappear. Primitive religion could be used 'with deadly effect against Christianity', for if the origins were found to arise from error, superstition, emotional stress, or social function, then all the higher religions would be discredited as well. Eliade notes the same among continental writers; Comte, Buchner and Haeckel were apostles of positivistic propaganda. But they, and the British theorists, 'shared something in common: all of them were dissatisfied with Christianity'. However, Eliade interprets the inquiry into the primitive, the anxious search for beginnings, as 'a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original, universal matrix'. The desire to seek for origins was irresistible, to discover the beginnings of the soul, if not in God then in matter. Matter solved all problems, giving the assurance of an age old past and an infinite future of'tiresome progress', with a kind of messianic optimism. Evans-Pritchard discusses in turn the most popular of the psychological and sociological theories of religion. Max Miiller was chiefly interested in Indian and classical mythology, but he was dominated by the nature-myth theory that gods are personified phenomena of nature and no more. This could be applied to all religion, though ideas derived from natural phenomena became fixed in symbol and metaphor, and he even called religion 'a disease of language.' Herbert Spencer, whose works now seem intolerably dreary and make one feel glad that George Eliot did not marry this man who was once her mentor and would have crushed her genius, found the origins of religion in ghosts, which developed into ancestors and gods, the theory of euhemerism. Evans-Pritchard ridicules this as the 'if I were a horse' fallacy. It was what Spencer imagined he would have thought had he been a primitive man; and Spencer does not seem to have asked himself how fallacious reasoning about dreams and butterflies could have lasted thousands of years and still be held today by many civilised people. Edward Tylor's theory of primitive animism picked on souls rather than ghosts, but he invented thoughts for primitive man and assumed both a soul theory and the transfer of this soul to other creatures and even to inanimate nature. Sir James Frazer, whose endless Golden Bough is now unread except in small selections where a round style partly redeems the hotch-potch of travellers' tales, added little to Tylor's animism. But Frazer introduced new fallacies in postulating stages of religion in which magic came first, being followed by religion, to be ousted in its turn by science. The theory of the animistic origins came to be generally accepted as self-evident, though Marett tried

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to modify it by suggesting a pre-animistic stage of animatism or mana, in which force rather than souls was the motive. Marett also objected to the assumption of the rationality of primitive man, declaring that his religion arose from action rather than ideas, being 'not so much thought out as danced out'. Meanwhile Comte had taken up a notion of de Brosses that religion began from fetishism, the worship of material objects, and gradually developed by amiable and inevitable evolution into polytheism and monotheism. Jevons popularised this in a textbook that is now called 'just plain nonsense'. Andrew Lang was one of the few challengers of the belief that gods grew out of ghosts or souls, but he had his own theory of a primitive monotheism, the idea of a creative and fatherly omnipotent God being universal. This was adopted later by Wilhelm Schmidt, forcing much recalcitrant material into the mould. Finally came Freud, saying that religion is an illusion with its origins and continuance in feelings of guilt, based on 'a just-so story which only a genius could have ventured to compose, for no evidence was, or could be, adduced in support of it', comments Evans-Pritchard. 'The tale deserves a fairy-story opening.' 'Once upon a time' men, and horses, rose against the father who had kept all the females for himself; the sons killed the father, ate him, then in remorse deified him, and identified him with an animal totem. Hence the totemistic origin of religion, based upon an Oedipus complex, of which it may be said that never was a famoustheory founded upon_a jrreaterabsence of evidence. This is blasphemy to devout Freudians, but Eliade also remarks that Freud's 'astonishing explanation was universally criticised and rejected by all responsible ethnologists, from Kroeber to Malinowski and from Boas to Schmidt. But Freud neither renounced nor modified his theory'. Freud, we know, took some of his support from Robertson Smith's once widely read Religion of the Semites, with his assertions that Semitic tribes killed and ate their totem animals, this being the origin of communion feasts and the root meaning of sacrifice. It was assumed that all peoples had had totems and ate their flesh. There are no grounds whatever for these assumptions, says Evans-Pritchard. 'In the vast literature on totemism throughout the world, there is only one instance, among the Australian aboriginals, of a people ceremonially eating their totems, and the significance of that instance, even if its veracity be accepted, is dubious and disputed.' It may be added that the Australian aboriginal tribes, so often assumed without proof to manifest truly 'primitive religion', have only been studied in part, rarely systematically, and still inadequately. Evans-Pritchard is kinder to Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl. Durkheim at least dismissed theories of primitive psychology and asked how religion could endure if based upon an illusion. For him religion was an objective and social fact. Yet he accepted Robertson Smith's totemism, but said that

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its object was not an illusory god but society itself. From this he concluded that all religions, all ideas of God and the soul, can be explained sociologically. Once again, not only is there no evidence for such origins, but the theory does not explain why religion should persist when its false basis is exposed, although religious beliefs are supposed to be automatically generated by society and essential to its maintenance. Durkheim also influenced classical scholars in this country, like Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison, who thought that Greek and all religion could be accounted for in terms of collective thinking, the rites expressing the structure of the worshipping society. Levy-Bruhl made a valuable contribution in emphasizing the differences between peoples, against the 'if I were a horse' fallacy. He spoke of 'prelogicaP peoples, not, as his critics asserted, that he considered them incapable of coherent thought, but that their beliefs did not fit our scientific views of the universe. He spoke of 'mystical' representations, which was enough to make the English suspicious. But he made primitive men more superstitious than they are, stressed differences at the expense of similarities, and was himself called 'prelogicaP by Bergson. The amazing, almost unbelievable, fact about nearly all these theorists on primitive religions and the beginnings of religion, was that they had no experience of the tribes about which they wrote so pontifically. Levy-Bruhl and his fellow French armchair theorists had never seen a primitive man. Frazer was repelled by the thought of speaking to one, and Jane Harrison confessed that 'savages weary and disgust me, though perforce I spend long hours in reading of their tedious doings'. Again and again comes the comment that there is 'no evidence' for theories: no history of totemism, no totemic cannibalism, no proof of magic appearing before religion, no support for universal primitive monotheism, no proof that 'primitives' really have a primordial religion. Of course modern anthropologists have long known this. Malinowski ridiculed the Frazerian manner of picking out some curious custom and drawing mysterious and universal deductions from it: 'in old Caledonia when a native accidentally finds a whisky bottle by the road-side he empties it at one gulp, after which he proceeds immediately to look for another'. Yet EvansPritchard remarks that such outworn methods, books and theories are still current. 'Most of what has been written in the past . . . and is still trotted out in colleges and universities, about animism, totemism, magic, etc., has been shown to be erroneous or at least dubious.' A recent Reader in Comparative Religion published in America is chiefly compiled from the old crowd: Tylor, Frazer, Freud and company. It is easy to throw bricks at the Aunt Sallies, our foolish predecessors, but what can be said now ? Is there less interest in religion as a whole now, or have the errors of speculation made us properly cautious? Eliade says bluntly that the historian of religions knows that he cannot and never will

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be able to reach the 'origin' of religion. This is no longer a problem for him, though it may be one for the theologian or psychologist. For Freud's attempt to find an origin led him to postulate a primordial event. The longing for beginnings led to an encounter with history. But, modern illiterates are not primordial savages. As for those ancestors who painted the French caves thirteen thousand years ago, they were still modern and thinking men. Their remains do not reveal all their beliefs, and there is no reason why complex systems of beliefs could not have existed a hundred thousand years before, leaving no traces, but expressing the reactions of homo sapiens to the universe then as now. But we have to 'renounce the old dream of grasping the origin of religion with the aid of historical tools', and must devote ourselves 'to the study of different phases of and aspects of religious life'. Evans-Pritchard, as a social anthropologist, demands scientific study of specific peoples, their languages, customs, organisation and religion. 'Primitive' religion has a proper place in the comparative study of religions, for the old distinctions of natural and 'revealed' religions only create obscurity, since 'all religions are religions of revelation'. Comparative religion, this vast subject still hardly represented in British universities, is not only a study of history and texts, but of ordinary people and the part that religion plays in their lives. 'Religion is what religion does'. Finally it is noted that too many theorists of the past were not primarily concerned with facts, but they aimed at demonstrating the truth or falsity of religious thought. The modern student regards beliefs and rites as facts, whether or not he has any belief of his own. But, strange though it may seem, the believer in some form of religion is better fitted to understand the religion of other people, however primitive, than one who thinks it all illusion. 'The non-believer seeks for some theorybiological, psychological, or sociologicalwhich will explain the illusion; the believer seeks rather to understand the manner in which a people conceives of a reality and their relations to it.'

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