impersonal causes, by the moral state of the group. In fact, we have here a rite which, in its structure, is indistinguishable from the real mourning, but which is, nevertheless, independent of every notion of spirits or evil-working demons.2
Another circumstance which gives occasion for ceremonies of the same nature is the distress in which the society finds itself after an insufficient harvest. " The natives who live in the vicinity of Lake Eyre," says Eyimann, " also seek to prevent an insufficiency of food by means of secret ceremonies. But many of the ritual practices observed in this region are to be distinguished from those which have been mentioned already: it is not by symbolic dances, by imitative movements nor dazzling decorations that they try to act upon the religious powers or the forces of nature, but by means of the suffering which individuals inflict upon themselves. In the northern territories,
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it is by means of tortures, such as prolonged fasts, vigils, dances persisted up to the exhaustion of the dancers, and physical pains of every sort, that they attempt to appease the powers which are illdisposed towards men."1 The torments to which the natives submit themselves for this purpose sometimes leave them in such a state of exhaustion that they are unable to follow the hunt for some days to come.2
These practices are employed especially for fighting against drought. This is because a scarcity of water results in a general want. To remedy this evil, they have recourse to violent methods. One which is frequently used is the extraction of a tooth. Among the Kaitish, for example, they pull out an incisor from one man, and hang it on a tree.3 Among the Dieri, the idea of rain is closely associated with that of bloody incisions made in the skin of the chest and arms.4 Among this same people, whenever the drought is very great, the great council assembles and summons the whole tribe. It is really a tribal event. Women are sent in every direction to notify men to assemble at a given place and time. After they have assembled, they groan and cry in a piercing voice about the miserable state of the land, and they beg the Mura-mura (the mythical ancestors) to give them the power of making an abundant rain fall.5 In the cases, which, by the way, are very rare, when there has been an excessive rainfall, an analogous ceremony takes place to stop it. Old men then enter into a veritable frenzy,6 while the cries uttered by the crowd are really painful to hear.7
Spencer and Gillen describe, under the name of Intichiuma, a ceremony which may well have the same object and the same origin as the preceding ones : a physical torture is applied to make an animal species multiply. Among the Urabunna, there is one clan whose totem is a variety of snake called wadnungadni. This is how the chief of the clan proceeds, to make sure that these snakes may never be lacking. After having been decorated, he kneels down on the ground, holding his arms straight out. An assistant pinches the skin of his right arm between his fingers, and the officiant forces a pointed bone five inches long through the fold thus formed. This self-mutilation is believed to produce the desired result.8 An analogous rite is used among the Dieri to make the wild-hens lay : the operators pierce their scrotums.9
2Of course each churinga is believed to be connected with an ancestor. But it is not to appease the spirits of the ancestors that they moum for the lost churinga. We have shown elsewhere (p. 123) that the idea of the ancestor only entered into the conception of the churinga secondarily and late.
1Op. cit., p. 207 ; cf. p. 116.
2Eyimann, p. 208.
3Ibid., p. 2ir.
4Howitt, The Dieri, in J.A.I., XX (1891), p. 93.
5Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 394.
6Howitt, ibid., p. 396.
7Communication of Gason in J.A.I., XXIV (1895), p. 175
8Nor. Tr., p. 286.
9Gason. The Dieri Tribe, in Curr. II. p. 68.
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In certain of the Lake Eyre tribes, men pierce their ears to make yams reproduce.1
But these partial or total famines are not the only plagues which may fall upon a tribe. Other events happen more or less periodically which menace, or seem to menace, the existence of the group. This is the case, for example, with the southern lights. The Kurnai believe that this is a fire lighted in the heavens by the great god Mungan-ngaua ; therefore, whenever they see it, they are afraid that it may spread to the earth and devour them, so a great effervescence results in the camp. They shake a withered hand, to which the Kurnai attribute various virtues, and utter such cries as " Send it away ; do not let us be burned." At the same time, the old men order an exchange of wives, which always indicates a great excitement.2 The same sexual licence is mentioned among the Wiimbaio whenever a plague appears imminent, and especially in times of an epidemic.3
Under the influence oi these ideas, mutilations and the shedding of blood are sometimes considered an efficient means of curing maladies. If an accident happens to a child among the Dieri, his relations beat themselves on the head with clubs or boomerangs until the blood flows down over their faces. They believe that by this process, they relieve the child of the suffering.4 Elsewhere, they imagine that they can obtain the same end by means of a supplementary totemic ceremony.5 We may connect with these the example already given of a ceremony celebrated specially to efface the effects of a ritual fault.6 Of course there are neither wounds nor blows nor physical suffering of any sort in these two latter cases, yet the rite does not differ in nature from the others : the end sought is always the turning aside of an evil or the expiation of a fault by means of an extraordinary ritual prestation.
Outside of mourning, such are the only cases of piacular rites which we have succeeded in finding in Australia. To be sure, it is probable that some have escaped us, while we may presume equally well that others have remained unperceived by the observers. But if those discovered up to the present are few in number, it is probably because they do not hold a
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large place in the cult. We see how far primitive religions are from being the daughters of agony and fear from the fact that the rites translating these painful emotions are relatively rare. Of course this is because the Australian, while leading a miserable existence as compared with other more civilized peoples, demands so little of life that he is easily contented. All that he asks is that nature follow its normal course, that the seasons succeed one another regularly, that the rain fall, at the ordinary time, in abundance and without excess. Now great disturbances in the cosmic order are always exceptional; thus it is noticeable that the majority of the regular piacular rites, examples of which we have given above, have been observed in the tribes of the centre, where droughts are frequent and constitute veritable disasters. It is still surprising, it is true, that piacular rites specially destined to expiate sins, seem to be completely lacking. However, the Australian, like every other man, must commit ritual faults, which he has an interest in redeeming ; so we may ask if the silence of the texts on this point may not be due to insufficient observation.
But howsoever few the facts which we have been able to gather may be, they are, nevertheless, instructive.
When we study piacular rites in the more advanced religions, where the religious forces are individualized, they appear to be closely bound up with anthropomorphic conceptions. When the believer imposes privations upon himself and submits himself to austerities, it is in order to disarm
1Gason, The Dieri Tribe: Eyimann, p. 208.
2Howitt. Nat. Tr., pp. 277 and 430.
3Ibid., p. 195 Gason, The Dieri Tribe, in Curr, II, p. 69.
4The same process is used to expiate a ridiculous act. Whenever anybody, by his awkwardness or otherwise, has caused the laughter of others, he asks one of them to beat him on the head until blood flows. Then things are all right again, and the one who was laughed at joins in the general gaiety (ibid., p. 70).
5Eyimann, pp. 212 and 447.
6See above, p. 385.
the malevolence attributed by him to certain of the sacred beings upon whom he thinks that he is dependent. To appease their hatred or anger, he complies with their exigencies; he beats himself in order that he may not be beaten by them. So it seems as though these practices could not arise until after gods and spirits were conceived as moral persons, capable of passions analogous to those of men. For this reason, Robertson Smith thought it possible to assign a relatively late date to expiatory sacrifices, just as to sacrificial oblations. According to him, the shedding of blood which characterizes these rites was at first a simple process of communion : men poured forth their blood upon the altar in order to strengthen the bonds uniting them to their god. The rite acquired a piacular and penal character only when its original significance was forgotten and when the new idea which was formed of sacred beings allowed men to attribute another function to it.1
But as piacular rites are met with even in the Australian societies, it is impossible to assign them so late an origin.
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Moreover, all that we have observed, with one single exception,1 are independent of all anthropomorphic conceptions : there is no question of either spirits or gods. Abstinences and effusions of blood stop famines and cure sicknesses directly and by themselves. No spiritual being introduces his action between the rite and the effect it is believed to produce. So mythical personalities intervened only at a late date. After the mechanism of the ritual had once been established, they served to make it more easily representable in the mind, but they are not conditions of its existence. It is for other reasons that it was founded; it is to another cause that it owes its efficacy.
It acts through the collective forces which it puts into play. Does a misfortune which menaces the group appear imminent ? Then the group unites, as in the case of mourning, and it is naturally an impression of uneasiness and perplexity which dominates the assembled body. Now, as always, the pooling of these sentiments results in intensifying them. By affirming themselves, they exalt and impassion themselves and attain a degree of violence which is translated by the corresponding violence of the gestures which express them. Just as at the death of a relative, they utter terrible cries, fly into a passion and feel that they roust tear and destroy; it is to satisfy this need that they beat themselves, wound themselves, and make their blood flow. When emotions have this vivacity, they may well be painful, but they are not depressing; on the contrary, they denote a state of effervescence which implies a mobilization of all our active forces, and even a supply of external energies. It matters little that this exaltation was provoked by a sad event, for it is real, notwithstanding, and does not differ specifically from what is observed in the happy feasts. Sometimes it is even made manifest by movements of the same nature: there is the same frenzy which seizes the worshippers and the same tendency towards sexual debauches, a sure sign of great nervous over-excitement. Robertson Smith had already noticed this curious influence of sad rites in the Semitic cults: " in evil times," he says, " when men's thoughts were habitually sombre, they betook themselves to the physical excitement of religion as men now take refuge in wine. . . .
And so in general when an act of Semitic worship began with sorrow and lamentation—as in the mourning for Adonis, or the great atoning ceremonies which became common in later times—a swift revulsion of feeling followed, and the gloomy part of the service was presently
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succeeded by a burst of hilarious revelry."1 In a word, even when religious ceremonies have a disquieting or saddening event as their point of departure, they retain their stimulating power over the affective state of the group and individuals. By the mere fact that they are collective, they raise the vital tone. When one feels life within him—whether it be in the form of painful irritation or happy enthusiasm—he does not believe in death ; so he becomes reassured and takes courage again, and subject! vely, everything goes on as if the rite had really driven off the danger which was dreaded. This is how curing or preventive virtues come to be attributed to the movements
1 The Religion of the Semites, lect. XI.
1 This is the case in which the Dieri, according to Jason, invoke the Mura-mura of water during a drought. 1 Op. cif., p. 262.
which one makes, to the cries uttered, to the blood shed and to the wounds inflicted upon one's self or others; and as these different tortures necessarily make one suffer, suffering by itself is finally regarded as a means of conjuring evil or curing sickness.2 Later, when the majority of the religious forces had taken the form of moral personalities, the efficacy of these practices was explained by imagining that their object was to appease an evil-working or irritated god. But these conceptions only reflect the rite and the sentiments it arouses ; they are an interpretation of it, not its determining cause.
A negligence of the ritual acts in the same way. It, too, is a menace for the group; it touches it in its moral existence for it touches it in its beliefs. But if the anger which it causes is affirmed ostensibly and energetically, it compensates the evil which it has caused. For if it is acutely felt by all, it is because the infraction committed is an exception and the common faith remains entire. So the moral unity of the group is not endangered. Now the penalty inflicted as an expiation is only a manifestation of the public anger, the material proof of its unanimity. So it really does have the healing effect attributed to it. At bottom, the sentiment which is at the root of the real expiatory rites does not differ in nature from that which we have found at the basis of the other piacular rites : it is a sort of irritated sorrow which tends to manifest itself by acts of destruction. Sometimes it is assuaged to the detriment of him who feels it; sometimes it is at the expense of some foreign third party. But in either case, the psychic mechanism is essentially the same.3
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IV
One of the greatest services which Robertson Smith has rendered to the science of religions is to have pointed out the ambiguity of the notion of sacredness.
Religious forces are of two sorts. Some are beneficent, guardians of the physical and moral order, dispensers of life and health and all the qualities which men esteem : this is the case with the totemic principle, spread out in the whole species, the mythical ancestor, the animal-protector, the civilizing heroes and the tutelar gods of every kind and degree. It matters little whether they are conceived as distinct personalities or as diffused energies ; under either form they fulfil the same function and affect the minds of the believers in the same way : the respect which they inspire is mixed with love and gratitude. The things and the persons which are normally connected with them participate in the same sentiments and the same character : these are holy things and persons. Such are the spots consecrated to the cult, the objects which serve in the regular rites, the priests, the ascetics, etc.—On the other hand, there are evil and impure powers, productive of disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The only sentiments which men have for them are a fear into which horror generally enters. Such are the forces upon which and by which the sorcerer acts, those which arise from corpses or the menstrual blood, those freed by every profanation of sacred things, etc. The spirits of the dead and malign genii of every sort are their personified forms.
Between these two categories of forces and beings, the contrast is as complete as possible and even goes into the most radical antagonism. The good and salutary powers repel to a distance these others which deny and contradict them. Therefore the former are forbidden to the latter : any contact between them is considered the worst of profanations. This is the typical form of those interdicts between sacred things of different species, the existence of which we have already pointed out.1 Women during menstruation, and especially at its beginning, are impure ; so at this moment they are rigorously sequestered; men may have no relations with them.2 Bull-roarers and churinga never come near a dead man.3 A sacrilegious
2It is also possible that the belief in the morally tempering virtues of suffering (see above, p. 312) has added something here. Since sorrow sanctifies and raises the religions level of Ihe worshipper, it may also raise him up again when he falls lower than usual.
3Cf. what we have said of expiation in our Division du travail social, pp. 64 ff.
1See above, p. yii.
2Spencer and'Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 460; Nor. Tr., p. 601; Roth, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, p. 24. It is useless to multiply references for so well-known a fact.
3However, Spencer and Gillen cite one case where churinga are placed on the head of the dead man (Nat. Tr., p.
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person is excluded from the society of the faithful ; access to the cult is forbidden him. Thus the whole religious life gravitates about two contrary poles between which there is the same opposition as between the pure and the impure, the saint and the sacrilegious, the divine and the diabolic.
But while these two aspects of the religious life oppose one another, there is a close kinship between them. In the first place, both have the same relation towards profane beings: these must abstain from all contact with impure things just as from the most holy things. The former are no less forbidden than the latter : they are withdrawn from circulation alike. This shows that they too are sacred. Of course the sentiments inspired by the two are not identical: respect is one thing, disgust and horror another. Yet, if the gestures are to be the same in both cases, the sentiments expressed must not differ in nature. And, in fact, there is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not without a certain reverential character. The shades by which these two attitudes are differentiated are even so slight sometimes that it is not always easy to say which state of mind the believers actually happen to be in. Among certain Semitic peoples, pork was forbidden, but it was not always known exactly whether this was because it was a pure or an impure thing1 and the same may be said of a very large number of alimentary interdictions.
But there is more to be said ; it very frequently happens that an impure thing or an evil power becomes a holy thing or a guardian power, without changing its nature, through a simple modification of external circumstances. We have seen how the soul of a dead man, which is a dreaded principle at first, is transformed into a protecting genius as soon as the mourning is finished. Likewise, the corpse, which begins by inspiring terror and aversion, is later regarded as a venerated relic : funeral anthropophagy, which is frequently practised in the Australian societies, is a proof of this transformation.2 The totemic animal is the pre-eminently sacred being ; but for him who eats its flesh unduly, it is a cause of death. In a general way, the sacrilegious person is merely a profane one who has been infected with a benevolent religious force. This changes its nature in changing its habitat; it defiles rather than sanctifies.3 The
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blood issuing from the genital organs of a woman, though it is evidently as impure as that of menstruation, is frequently used as a remedy against sickness.1 The victim immolated in expiatory sacrifices is charged with impurities, for they have concentrated upon it the sins which were to be expiated. Yet, after it has been slaughtered, its flesh and blood are employed for the most pious uses.2 On the contrary, though the communion is generally a religious operation whose normal function is to consecrate, it sometimes produces the effects of a sacrilege. In certain cases, the persons who have communicated are forced to flee from one another as from men infected with a plague. One would say that they have become a source of dangerous contamination for one another : the sacred bond which unites them also separates them. Examples of this sort of communion are numerous in Australia. One of the most typical has been observed among the Narrinyeri and the neighbouring tribes. When an infant arrives in the world, its parents carefully preserve its umbilical cord, which is believed to conceal a part of its soul. Two persons who exchange the cords thus preserved communicate together by the very act of this exchange, for it is as though they exchanged their souls. But, at the same time, they are forbidden to touch or speak to or even
156). But they admit that the fact is unique and abnormal (ibid., p. X5'/), while Strehlow energetically denies it (II, p. 79).
1Smith, Rel. of Semites, p. 153 ; cf. p. 446, the additional note. Holiness, Uncleanness and Taboo.
2Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 448-450 ; Brough Smyth, I, pp. 118, 120; Dawson, p. 67 ; Eyre, II, p. 251 ; Roth, North Queensland Ethn., Bull. Mo. 9, in Rec. of the Austral. Museum, VI, No. 5, p. 367.
3See above, p. 320.
1Nor. Tr., p. 599 ; Nat. Tr; p. 464.
2Among the Hebrews, for example, they sprinkled the altar witli the blood of the expiatory victim (Lev. iv, 5 ff.) ; they burned the flesh and used products of this combustion to make water of purification (Numb. xix).