and now we have reached at last the end of our long and toilsome disquisition. i need hardly say, to those who have persisted with me so far, that i do not regard a single part of it all as by any means final. there is not a chapter in this book, indeed, which i could not have expanded to double or treble its present length, had i chosen to include in it a tithe of the evidence i have gathered on the subject with which it deals. but for many adequate reasons, compression was imperative. some of the greatest treatises ever written on this profoundly important and interesting question have met with far less than the attention they deserved because they were so bulky and so overloaded with evidence that the reader could hardly see the wood for the trees; he lost the thread of the argument in the mazes of example. in my own case, i had or believed i had a central idea; and i desired to set that idea forth with such simple brevity as would enable the reader to grasp it and to follow it. i go, as it were, before a grand jury only. i do not pretend in any one instance to have proved my points; i am satisfied if i have made out a prima facie case for further enquiry.
my object in the present reconstructive treatise has therefore been merely to set forth in as short a form as was consistent with clearness my conception of the steps by which mankind arrived at its idea of its god. i have not tried to produce evidence on each step in full; i have only tried to lay before the general public a rough sketch of a psychological 435rebuilding, and to suggest at the same time to scholars and anthropologists some inkling of the lines along which evidence in favour of my proposed reconstruction is likeliest to be found. this book is thus no more than a summary of probabilities. should it succeed in attracting attention and arousing interest in so vast and fundamental a subject, i shall hope to follow it up by others in future, in which the various component elements of my theory will be treated in detail, and original authorities will be copiously quoted with the fullest references. as, however, in this preliminary outline of my views i have dealt with few save well-known facts, and relied for the most part upon familiar collocations of evidence, i have not thought it necessary to encumber my pages with frequent and pedantic footnotes, referring to the passages or persons quoted. the scholar will know well enough where to look for the proofs he needs, while the general reader can only judge my rough foreshadowing of a hypothesis according as he is impressed by its verisimilitude or the contrary.
if, on the other hand, this avant-courier of a reasoned system fails to interest the public, i must perforce be content to refrain from going any deeper in print into this fascinating theme, on which i have still an immense number of ideas and facts which i desire the opportunity of publicly ventilating.
i wish also to remark before i close that i do not hold dogmatically to the whole or any part of the elaborate doctrine here tentatively suggested. i have changed my own mind far too often, with regard to these matters, in the course of my personal evolution, ever to think i have reached complete finality. fifteen or twenty years ago, indeed, i was rash enough to think i had come to anchor, when i first read mr. herbert spencer’s sketch of the origin of religion in the opening volume of the principles of sociology. ten or twelve years since, doubts and difficulties again obtruded themselves. six years ago, once more, 436when the golden bough appeared, after this book had been planned and in part executed, i was forced to go back entirely upon many cherished former opinions, and to reconsider many questions which i had fondly imagined were long since closed for me. since that time, new lights have been constantly shed upon me from without, or have occurred to me from within: and i humbly put this sketch forward now for what it may be worth, not with the idea that i have by any means fathomed the whole vast truth, but in the faint hope that i may perhaps have looked down here and there a little deeper into the profound abysses beneath us than has been the lot of most previous investigators. at the same time, i need hardly reiterate my sense of the immense obligations under which i lie to not a few among them, and preeminently to mr. spencer, mr. frazer, mr. hartland, and dr. tylor. my only claim is that i may perhaps have set forth a scheme of reconstruction which further evidence will possibly show to be true in parts, and mistaken in others..
on the other hand, by strictly confining my attention to religious features, properly so called, to the exclusion of mythology, ethics, and all other external accretions or accidents, i trust i have been able to demonstrate more clearly than has hitherto been done the intimate connexion which always exists between cults in general and the worship of the dead god, natural or artificial. even if i have not quite succeeded in inducing the believer in primitive animism to reconsider his prime dogma of the origin of gods from all-pervading spirits (of which affiliation i can see no proof in the evidence before us), i venture to think i shall at any rate have made him feel that ancestor-worship and the cult of the dead god have played a far larger and deeper part than he has hitherto been willing to admit in the genesis of the religious emotions. though i may not have raised the worship of the dead man to a supreme and unique place in the god-making process, i have at least, i trust, raised it to a position of higher importance than 437it has hitherto held, even since the publication of mr. herbert spencer’s epoch-making researches. i believe i have made it tolerably clear that the vast mass of existing gods or divine persons, when we come to analyse them, do actually turn out to be dead and deified human beings. in short, it is my hope that i have rehabilitated euhemerism.
this is not the place, at the very end of so long a disquisition, to examine the theory of primitive animism. i would therefore only say briefly here that i do not deny the actual existence of that profoundly animistic frame of mind which mr. im thurn has so well depicted among the indians of guiana; nor that which exists among the sa-moyeds of siberia; nor that which meets us at every turn in historical accounts of the old roman religion. i am quite ready to admit that, to people at that stage of religious evolution, the world seems simply thronged with spirits on every side, each of whom has often his own special functions and peculiar prerogatives. but i fail to see that any one of these ideas is demonstrably primitive. most often, we can trace ghosts, spirits, and gods to particular human origins: where spirits exist in abundance and pervade all nature, i still fail to understand why they may not be referred to the one known source and spring of all ghostly beings. it is abundantly clear that no distinction of name or rite habitually demarcates these ubiquitous and uncertain spirits at large from those domestic gods whose origin is perfectly well remembered in the family circle. i make bold to believe, therefore, that in every such case we have to deal with unknown and generalised ghosts,—with ghosts of most varying degrees of antiquity. if any one can show me a race of spirit-believers who do not worship their own ancestral spirits, or can adduce any effective prime differentia between the spirit that was once a living man, and the spirit that never was human at all, i will gladly hear him. up to date, however, no such race has been pointed out, and no such differentia ever posited.
the 438truth is, we have now no primitive men at all. existing men are the descendants of people who have had religions, in all probability, for over a million years. the best we can do, therefore, is to trace what gods we can to their original source, and believe that the rest are of similar development. and whither do we track them?
“so far as i have been able to trace back the origin of the best-known minor provincial deities,” says sir alfred lyall, speaking of india in general, “they are usually men of past generations who have earned special promotion and brevet rank among disembodied ghosts.... of the numerous local gods known to have been living men, by far the greater proportion derive from the ordinary canonisation of holy personages.... the number of shrines thus raised in berar alone to these anchorites and persons deceased in the odour of sanctity is large, and it is constantly increasing. some of them have already attained the rank of temples.” we have seen that an acute observer, erman, came to a similar conclusion about the gods of those very ostyaks who are often quoted as typical examples of primitive animists. of late years, all the world over, numerous unprejudiced investigators, like mr. duff macdonald and captain henderson, have similarly come to the conclusion that the gods of the natives among whom they worked were all of human origin; while we know that some whole great national creeds, like the shinto of japan, recognise no deities at all save living kings and dead ancestral spirits. under these circumstances, judging the unknown by the known, i hesitate to take the very bold step of positing any new and fanciful source for the small residuum of unresolved gods whose human origin is less certainly known to us.
in one word, i believe that corpse-worship is the protoplasm of religion, while admitting that folk-lore is the protoplasm of mythology, and of its more modern and philosophical offshoot, theology.
