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object:1.23 - Our Debt to the Savage
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



XXIII. Our Debt to the Savage

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
shown, 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.

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. 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._





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