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object:1.69 - Farewell to Nemi
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


LXIX. Farewell to Nemi

WE are at the end of our enquiry, but as often happens in the search
after truth, if we have answered one question, we have raised many
more; if we have followed one track home, we have had to pass by
others that opened off it and led, or seemed to lead, to far other
goals than the sacred grove at Nemi. Some of these paths we have
followed a little way; others, if fortune should be kind, the writer
and the reader may one day pursue together. For the present we have
journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part. Yet before we
do so, we may well ask ourselves whether there is not some more
general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of hope and
encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy record of human error
and folly which has engaged our attention in this book.

If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential similarity of
man's chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on the other
hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted to
satisfy them in different ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to
conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can
trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to
science. In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the
difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes
in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely
count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order
of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed
himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely
on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws
himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind
the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching
powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds
magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the
succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the
passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though
vastly superior to him in power.

But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be
unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events
is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable
and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by closer
observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession
the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual
precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of
nature are carried on. Every great advance in knowledge has extended
the sphere of order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of
apparent disorder in the world, till now we are ready to anticipate
that even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to
reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos
to cosmos. Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper
solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the
religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure
to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in
magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible
regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully
observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to
act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of
nature, is displaced by science.

But while science has this much in common with magic that both rest
on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things,
readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order
presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis
of science. The difference flows naturally from the different modes
in which the two orders have been reached. For whereas the order on
which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of the
order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order laid
down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the
phenomena themselves. The abundance, the solidity, and the splendour
of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to
inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its
method. Here at last, after groping about in the dark for countless
ages, man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden key that
opens many locks in the treasury of nature. It is probably not too
much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as
well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of
science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific
discovery is a wrong to humanity.

Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that
because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet
been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must
remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common
parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to
explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we
dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe.
In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but
theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors,
so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect
hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the
phenomena--of registering the shadows on the screen--of which we in
this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an
infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. We need
not murmur at the endless pursuit:


  Fatti non foste a viver come bruti
  Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.


Great things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy
them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future--some
great Ulysses of the realms of thought--than shine on us. The dreams
of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark
shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however
vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may
have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of
those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly
for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth
swims as a speck or mote. In the ages to come man may be able to
predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds
and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed
afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire
of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such
distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these
gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are
only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up
out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress
has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that
to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

Without dipping so far into the future, we may illustrate the course
which thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of
three different threads--the black thread of magic, the red thread
of religion, and the white thread of science, if under science we
may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature,
of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then
survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably
perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork
of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of
religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will
remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through
it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion has
entered most deeply into its texture, a dark crimson stain, which
shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as the white thread of
science is woven more and more into the tissue. To a web thus
chequered and stained, thus shot with threads of diverse hues, but
gradually changing colour the farther it is unrolled, the state of
modern thought, with all its divergent aims and conflicting
tendencies, may be compared. Will the great movement which for
centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of thought be
continued in the near future? or will a reaction set in which may
arrest progress and even undo much that has been done? To keep up
our parable, what will be the colour of the web which the Fates are
now weaving on the humming loom of time? will it be white or red? We
cannot tell. A faint glimmering light illumines the backward portion
of the web. Clouds and thick darkness hide the other end.

Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her
weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It
is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to
the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset,
its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome
and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter's. The sight
once seen can never be forgotten, but we turn from it and pursue our
way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look
down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast disappearing in the
evening shadows. The place has changed but little since Diana
received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The
temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of
the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi's
woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the
west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound
of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. _Ave Maria!_
Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die
lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. _Le roi est
mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!_




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1.69 - Farewell to Nemi
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