The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 03 of 12)

Chapter VII. Our Debt To The Savage

General conclusion. Human gods, on whom the welfare of the community is believed to depend, are obliged to observe many rules to ensure their own safety and that of their people.

It would be easy to extend the list of royal and priestly taboos, but the instances collected in the preceding pages may suffice as specimens. To conclude this part of our subject it only remains to state summarily the general conclusions to which our enquiries have thus far conducted us. We have seen that in savage or barbarous society there are often found men to whom the superstition of their fellows ascribes a controlling influence over the general course of nature. Such men are accordingly adored and treated as gods. Whether these human divinities also hold temporal sway over the lives and fortunes of their adorers, or whether their functions are purely spiritual and supernatural, in other words, whether they are kings as well as gods or only the latter, is a distinction which hardly concerns us here. Their supposed divinity is the essential fact with which we have to deal. In virtue of it they are a pledge and guarantee to their worshippers of the continuance and orderly succession of those physical phenomena upon which mankind depends for subsistence. Naturally, therefore, the life and health of such a god-man are matters of anxious concern to the people whose welfare and even existence are bound up with his; naturally he is constrained by them to conform to such rules as the wit of early man has devised for averting the ills to which flesh is heir, including the last ill, death. These rules, as an examination of them has shewn, are nothing but the maxims with which, on the primitive view, every man of common prudence must comply if he would live long in the land. But while in the case of ordinary men the observance of the rules is left to the choice of the individual, in the case of the god-man it is enforced under penalty of dismissal from his high station, or even of death. For his worshippers have far too great a stake in his life to allow him to play fast and loose with it. Therefore all the quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated long ago, and which old women at chimney corners still impart as treasures of great price to their descendants gathered round the cottage fire on winter evenings – all these antique fancies clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path of the old king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in the toils of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom, “light as air but strong as links of iron,” that crossing and recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a network of observances from which death or deposition alone could release him.

A study of these rules affords us an insight into the philosophy of the savage. Our debt to our savage forefathers.

Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and priests teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency. Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and harmonious whole.¹⁵⁵¹ The flaw – and it is a fatal one – of the system lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its conception of the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the conclusions which it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise these premises as ridiculous because we can easily detect their falseness, would be ungrateful as well as unphilosophical. We stand upon the foundation reared by the generations that have gone before, and we can but dimly realise the painful and prolonged efforts which it has cost humanity to struggle up to the point, no very exalted one after all, which we have reached. Our gratitude is due to the nameless and forgotten toilers, whose patient thought and active exertions have largely made us what we are. The amount of new knowledge which one age, certainly which one man, can add to the common store is small, and it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to ignore the heap while vaunting the few grains which it may have been our privilege to add to it. There is indeed little danger at present of undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even classical antiquity have made to the general advancement of our race. But when we pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt and ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the only recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many, perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought most our own, and that their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day stand in need of; cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi sunt.

Note. Not To Step Over Persons And Things.¹⁵⁵²

The superstition that harm is done to a person or thing by stepping over him or it is very widely spread. Thus the Galelareese think that if a man steps over your fishing-rod or your arrow, the fish will not bite when you fish with that rod, and the game will not be hit by that arrow when you shoot it. They say it is as if the implements merely skimmed past the fish or the game.¹⁵⁵³ Similarly, if a Highland sportsman saw a person stepping over his gun or fishing-rod, he presumed but little on that day's diversion.¹⁵⁵⁴ When a Dacota had bad luck in hunting, he would say that a woman had been stepping over some part of the animal which he revered.¹⁵⁵⁵ Amongst many South African tribes it is considered highly improper to step over a sleeper; if a wife steps over her husband he cannot hit his enemy in war; if she steps over his assegais, they are from that time useless, and are given to boys to play with.¹⁵⁵⁶ The Baganda think that if a woman steps over a man's weapons, they will not aim straight and will not kill, unless they have been first purified.¹⁵⁵⁷ The Nandi of British East Africa hold that to step over a snare or trap is to court death and must be avoided at all risks; further, they are of opinion that if a man were to step over a pot, he would fall to pieces whenever the pot were broken.¹⁵⁵⁸ The people of the Lower Congo deem that to step over a person's body or legs will cause ill-luck to that person and they are careful not to do so, especially in passing men who are holding a palaver. At such times a passer-by will shuffle his feet along the ground without lifting them in order that he may not be charged with bringing bad luck on any one.¹⁵⁵⁹ On the other hand among the Wajagga of East Africa grandchildren leap over the corpse of their grandfather, when it is laid out, expressing a wish that they may live to be as old as he.¹⁵⁶⁰ In Laos hunters are careful never to step over their weapons.¹⁵⁶¹ The Tepehuanes of Mexico believe that if anybody steps over them, they will not be able to kill another deer in their lives.¹⁵⁶² Some of the Australian aborigines are seriously alarmed if a woman steps over them as they lie asleep on the ground.¹⁵⁶³ In the tribes about Maryborough in Queensland, if a woman steps over anything that belongs to a man he will throw it away.¹⁵⁶⁴ In New Caledonia it is thought to endanger a canoe if a woman steps over the cable.¹⁵⁶⁵ Everything that a Samoyed woman steps over becomes unclean and must be fumigated.¹⁵⁶⁶ Malagasy porters believe that if a woman strides over their poles, the skin will certainly peel off the shoulders of the bearers when next they take up the burden.¹⁵⁶⁷ The Cherokees fancy that to step over a vine causes it to wither and bear no fruit.¹⁵⁶⁸ The Ba-Pendi and Ba-thonga of South Africa think that if a woman steps over a man's legs, they will swell and he will not be able to run.¹⁵⁶⁹ According to the South Slavonians, the most serious maladies may be communicated to a person by stepping over him, but they can afterwards be cured by stepping over him in the reverse direction.¹⁵⁷⁰ The belief that to step over a child hinders it from growing is found in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Syria; in Syria, Germany, and Bohemia the mischief can be remedied by stepping over the child in the opposite direction.¹⁵⁷¹