follow.
IV
But if this contagiousness of sacredness helps to explain the system of interdicts, how is it to be explained itself ?
Some have tried to explain it with the well-known laws of the association of ideas. The sentiments inspired in us by a person or a thing spread contagiously from the idea of this thing or person to the representations associated with it, and thence to the objects which these representations express. So the respect which we have for a sacred being is communicated to everything touching this being, or resembling it, or recalling it. Of course a cultivated man is not deceived by these associations; he knows that these derived emotions are due to mere plays of the images and to entirely mental combinations, so he does not give way to the superstitions which these illusions tend to bring about. But they say that the primitive naively objectifies his impressions, without criticising them. Does something inspire a reverential fear in him ? He concludes that an august and redoubtable force really resides in it; so he keeps at a distance from this thing and treats it as though it were sacred, even though it has no right to this title.1
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But whoever says this forgets that the most primitive religions are not the only ones which have attributed this power of propagation to the sacred character. Even in the most recent cults, there is a group of rites which repose upon this principle. Does not every consecration by means of anointing or washing consist in transferring into a profane object the sanctifying virtues of a sacred one ? Yet it is difficult to regard an enlightened Catholic of to-day as a sort of retarded savage who continues to be deceived by his associations of ideas, while nothing in the nature of things explains or justifies these ways of thinking. Moreover, it is quite arbitrarily that they attribute to the primitive this tendency to objectify blindly all his emotions. In his ordinary life, and in the details of his lay occupations, he does not impute the properties of one thing to its neighbours, or vice versa. If he is less careful than we are about clarity and distinction, still it is far from true that he has some vague, deplorable aptitude for jumbling and confusing everything. Religious thought alone has a marked leaning towards these sorts of confusions. So it is in something special to the nature of religious things, and not in the general laws of the human intelligence, that the origin of these predispositions is to be sought.
When a force or property seems to be an integral part or constituent element of the subject in which it resides, we cannot easily imagine its detaching itself and going elsewhere. A body is denned by its mass and its atomic composition ; so we do not think that it could communicate any of these distinctive characteristics by means of contact. But, on the other hand, if we are dealing with a force which has penetrated the body from without, since nothing attaches it there and since it is foreign to the body, there is nothing inconceivable in its escaping again. Thus the heat or electricity which a body has received from some external source may be transmitted to the surrounding medium, and the mind readily accepts the possibility of this transmission. So the extreme facility with which religious forces spread out and diffuse themselves has nothing surprising about it, if they are generally thought of as outside of the beings in which they reside. Now this is just what the theory we have proposed implies.
In fact, they are only collective forces hypostatized, that is to say, moral forces ; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world. So they are not homogeneous with the visible things among which we place them. They may well take from these things the outward and material forms in which they are represented, but they owe none of their efficacy
1 See Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 67-fiS. We say nothing of the recent, and slightly explicit, theory of Crawley (Mystic Rose, ch. iv—vii), according to which the contagiousness of taboos is due to a false interpretation of the phenomena of contagion. It is arbitrary. As Jevons very truly says in the passage to which we refer, the contagious character of sacred-ness is affirmed a priori, and not on a faith in badly interpreted experiences.
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to them. They are not united by external bonds to the different supports upon which they alight; they have no roots there ; according to an expression we have already used and which serves best for characterizing them, they are added to them.1 So there are no objects which are predestined to receive them, to the exclusion of all others ; even the most insignificant and vulgar may do so; accidental circumstances decide which are the chosen ones. The terms in which Codrington speaks of the mana should be borne in mind : it is a force, he says, which " is not fixed in anything and can be conveyed in almost anything."2 Likewise, the Dakota of Miss Fletcher represented the wakan as a sort of surrounding force which is always coming and going through the world, alighting here and there, but definitely fixing itself nowhere.3 Even the religious character inherent in men does not have a different character. There is certainly no other being in the world of experience which is closer to the very source of all religious life ; none participates in it more directly, for it is in human consciousnesses that it is elaborated. Yet we know that the religious principle animating men, to wit, the soul, is partially external.
But if religious forces have a place of their own nowhere, their mobility is easily explained. Since nothing attaches them to the things in which we localize them, it is natural that they should escape on the slightest contact, in spite of themselves, so to speak, and that they should spread afar. Their intensity incites them to this spreading, which everything favours. This is why the soul itself, though holding to the body by very personal bonds, is constantly threatening to leave it : all the apertures and pores of the body are just so many ways by which it tends to spread and diffuse itself into the outside.4
But we shall account for this phenomenon which we are trying to understand, still better if, instead of considering the notion of religious forces as it is when completely formulated, we go back to the mental process from which it results.
We have seen, in fact, that the sacred character of a being does not rest in any of its intrinsic attributes. It is not because the totemic animal has a certain aspect or property that it inspires religious sentiments ; these result from causes wholly foreign to the nature of the object upon which they fix themselves. What constitutes them are the impressions of comfort and dependence which the action of the society provokes in the mind. Of themselves, these emotions are not attached to the idea of any
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particular object; but as these emotions exist and are especially intense, they are also eminently contagious. So they make a stain of oil; they extend to all the other mental states which occupy the mind ; they penetrate and contaminate those representations especially in which are expressed the various objects which the man had in his hands or before his eyes at the moment: the totemic designs covering his body, the bull-roarers which he was making roar, the rocks surrounding him, the ground under his feet, etc. It is thus that the objects themselves get a religious value which is really not inherent in them but is conferred from without. So the contagion is not a sort of secondary process by which sacredness is propagated, after it has once been acquired; it is the very process by which it is acquired. It is by contagion that it establishes itself : we should not be surprised, therefore, if it transmits itself contagiously. What makes its reality is a special emotion ; if it attaches itself to some object, it is because this emotion has found this object in its way. So it is natural that from this one it should spread to all those which it finds in its neighbourhood, that is to say, to all those which any reason whatsoever, either material contiguity or mere similarity, has mentally connected with the first.
Thus, the contagiousness of sacredness finds its explanation in the theory which we have proposed of religious forces, and by this very fact, it serves to confirm our theory.1 And, at the
1See above, p. 229.
2See above, p. 104.
3See above, p. 190.
4This has been well demonstrated by Preuss in his articles in the Globus.
1 It is true that this contagiousness is not peculiar to religious forces ; those belonging to magic have the same
same time, it aids us in understanding a trait of primitive mentality to which we have already called the attention.
We have seen2 the facility with which the primitive confuses kingdoms and identifies the most heterogeneous things, men, animals, plants, stars, etc. Now we see one of the causes which has contributed the most to facilitating these confusions. Since religious forces are eminently contagious, it is constantly happening that the same principle animates very different objects equally ; it passes from some into others as the result of either a simple material proximity or of even a superficial similarity. It is thus that men, animals, plants and rocks come to have the same totem : the men because they bear the name of the animal: the animals because they bring the totemic emblem to mind; the plants because they nourish these animals ; the rocks because they mark the place where the ceremonies are celebrated. Now religious forces are therefore considered the source of all efficacy ;
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so beings having one single religious principle ought to pass as having the same essence, and as differing from one another only in secondary characteristics. This is why it seemed quite natural to arrange them in a single category and to regard them as mere varieties of the same class, transmutable into one anotlier.
When this relation has been established, it makes the phenomena of contagion appear under a new aspect. Taken by themselves, they seem to be quite foreign to the logical life. Is their effect not to mix and confuse beings, in spite of their natural differences ? But we have seen that these confusions and participation have played a role of the highest utility in logic ; they have served to bind together things which sensation leaves apart from one another. So it is far from true that contagion, the source 01 these connections and confusions, is marked with that fundamental irrationality that one is inclined to attribute it at first. It has opened the way for the scientific explanations of the future.
CHAPTER II
THE POSITIVE CULT
I.—The Elements of the Sacrifice
WHATEVER the importance of the negative cult may be, and though it may indirectly have positive effects, it does not contain its reason for existence in itself; it introduces one to the religious life, but it supposes this more than it constitutes it. If it orders the worshipper to flee from the profane world, it is to bring him nearer to the sacred world. Men have never thought that their duties towards religious forces might be reduced to a simple abstinence from all commerce ; they have always believed that they upheld positive and bilateral relations with them, whose regulation and organization is the function of a group of ritual practices. To this special system of rites we give the name of positive cult.
For some time we almost completely ignored the positive cult of the totemic religion and what it consists in. We knew almost nothing more than the initiation rites, and we do not know those sufficiently well even now. But the observations of Spencer and Gillen, prepared for by those of Schuize and confirmed by those of Strehlow, on the tribes of central Australia, have partially filled this gap in our information. There is one ceremony especially which these explorers have taken particular pains to describe to us and which, moreover, seems to dominate the whole totemic cult: this is the one that the Arunta, according to Spencer and Gillen, call the Intichiuma. It is true that Strehlow contests the meaning of this word. According to him, intichiuma (or, as he writes it, intijiumd} means " to instruct " and designates the ceremonies performed before the young man to teach him the traditions of the tribe. The feast which we are going to describe bears, he says, the
property ; yet it is evident that they do not correspond to objectified social sentiments. It is because magic forces have been conceived on the model of religious forces. We shall come back to this point again (see p. 361).
2 See above, p. 235.
name mbatjalkatiuma, which means " to fecundate " or "to put into a good condition."1 But we shall not try to settle this question of vocabulary, which touches the real problem but slightly, as the rites in question are all
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celebrated in the course of the initiation. On the other hand, as the word Intichiuma now belongs to the current language of ethnography, and has almost become a common noun, it seems useless to replace it with another.1
The date on which the Intichiuma takes place depends largely upon the season. There are two sharply separated seasons in Australia : one is dry and lasts for a long time; the other is rainy and is, on the contrary, very short and frequently irregular. As soon as the rains arrive, vegetation springs up from the ground as though by enchantment and animals multiply, so that the country which had recently been only a sterile desert is rapidly filled with a luxurious flora and fauna. It is just at the moment when the good season seems to be close at hand that the Intichiuma is celebrated. But as the rainy season is extremely variable, the date of the ceremonies cannot be fixed once for all. It varies with the climatic circumstances, which only the chief of the totemic group, the Alatunja, is qualified to judge : on a day which he considers suitable, he informs his companions that the moment has arrived.2
Each totemic group has its own Intichiuma. Even if this rite is general in the societies of the centre, it is not the same everywhere ; among the Warramunga, it is not what it is among the Arunta ; it varies, not only among the tribes, but also within the tribe, among the clans. But it is obvious that the different mechanisms in use are too closely related to each other to be dissociated completely. There is no ceremony, perhaps, which is not made up of several, though these are very unequally developed : what exists only as a germ in one, occupies the most important place in another, and inversely. Yet they must be carefully distinguished, for they constitute just so many different ritual types to be described and explained separately, but afterwards we must seek some common source from which they were derived.
Let us commence with those observed among the Arunta.
The celebration includes two successive phases. The object of the rites which take place in the first is to assure the prosperity of the animal or vegetable species serving the clan as totem. The means employed for this end may be reduced to two principal types.
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It will be remembered that the fabulous ancestors from whom each clan is supposed to be descended, formerly lived on earth and left traces of their passage there. These traces consist especially in stones and rocks which they deposited at certain places, or which were formed at the spots where they entered into the ground. These rocks and stones are considered the bodies or parts of the bodies of the ancestors, whose memory they keep alive; they represent them. Consequently, they also represent the animals and plants which served these same ancestors as totems, for an individual and his totem are only one. The same reality and the same properties are attributed to them as to the actually living plants or animals of the same species. But they have this advantage over these latter, that they are imperishable, knowing neither sickness nor death. So they are like a permanent immutable and ever-available reserve of animal and vegetable life. Also, in a certain number of cases, it is this reserve that they annually draw upon to assure the reproduction of the species.
Here, for example, is how the Witchetty grub clan, at Alice Springs, proceeds at its Intichiuma.1
On the day fixed by the chief, all the members of the totemic group assemble in the
1 Strehlow, I, p. 4.
1Of course the word designating these celebrations changes with the tribes. The Urabunna call them Pitjinta (Nor. Tr., p. 284) ; the Warramunga Thala-minta (ibid., p. 297), etc.
2Schuize, loc. cit., p. 243 ; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. i6q f,
1 Nat. Гг., pp. 170 ft".
principal camp. The men of the other totems retire to a distance;2 for among the Arunta, they are not allowed to be present at the celebration of the rite, which has all the characteristics of a secret ceremony. An individual of a different totem, but of the same phratry, may be invited to be present, as a favour ; but this is only as a witness. In no case can he take an active part.
After the men of the totem have assembled, they leave the camp, leaving only two or three of their number behind. They advance in a profound silence, one behind another, all naked, without arms and without any of their habitual ornaments. Their attitude and their pace are marked with a religious gravity: this is because the act in which they are taking part has an exceptional importance in their eyes. Also, until the end of the ceremony they are required to observe a rigorous fast.
The country which they traverse is all filled with souvenirs left by the glorious ancestors. Thus they arrive at a spot where a huge block of quartz is found, with small round stones all around it. This block represents the witchetty grub as an adult. The Alatunja strikes it with a sort of wooden tray called apmara3
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and at the same time he intones a chant, whose object is to invite the animal to lay eggs. He proceeds in the same fashion with the stones which are regarded as the eggs of the animal and with one of which he rubs the stomach of each assistant. This done, they all descend a little lower, to the foot of a cliff also celebrated in the myths of the Alcheringa, at the base of which is another stone, also representing the witchetty grub. The Alatunja strikes it with his apmara ; the men accompanying him do so as well, with branches of a gum-tree which they have gathered on the way, all of which goes on in the midst of chants renewing the invitation previously addressed to the animal. About ten different spots are visited in turn, some of which are a mile or more from the others. At each of them there is a stone at the bottom of a cave or hole, which is believed to represent the witchetty grub in one of his aspects or at one of the phases of his existence, and upon each of these stones, the same ceremonies are repeated.
The meaning of the rite is evident. When the Alatunja strikes the sacred stones, it is to detach some dust. The grains of this very holy dust are regarded as so many germs of life ; each of them contains a spiritual principle which will give birth to a new being, when introduced into an organism of the same species. The branches with which the assistants are provided serve to scatter this precious dust in all directions ; it is scattered everywhere, to accomplish its fecundating work. By this means, they assure, in their own minds, an abundant reproduction of the animal species over which the clans guard, so to speak, and upon which it depends.
The natives themselves give the rite this interpretation. Thus, in the clan of the ilpiria (a kind of "manna"), they proceed in the following manner. When the day of the Intichiuma arrives, the group assembles, near a huge rock, about fifty feet high ; on top of this rock is another, very similar to the first in aspect and surrounded by other smaller ones. Both represent masses of manna. The Alatunja digs up the ground at the foot of this rock and uncovers a churinga which is believed to have been buried there in Alcheringa times, and which is, as it were, the quintessence of the manna. Then he climbs up to the summit of the higher rock and rubs it, first with the churinga and then with the smaller stones which surround it. Finally, he brushes away the dust which has thus been collected on the surface of the rock, with the branches of a free ; each of the assistants does the same in his turn. Now Spencer and Gillen say that the idea of the natives is that the dust thus scattered will " settle upon the mulga trees and so produce
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manna." In fact, these operations are accompanied by a hymn sung by those present, in which this idea is expressed.1
With variations, this same rite is found in other societies. Among the Urabunna, there is a
2Of course the women are under the same obligation.
3The apmara is the only thing which he brought from the camp.
1Nat. Гг., pp. 185-186.