1866
The Religion of Savages
1871
Primitive Culture
1875Anthropoloy in
Encyclopedia
Tylor, E.B. 15.8.1866 "The Religion of Savages"
Fortnightly
Review 15.8.1866 - Volume 6, pages 71-86
The theory which endows the phenomenon of nature with personal life might
perhaps conveniently be called
'animism'
Tylor, E.B. 1871 Primitive Culture: Researches into
the
Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom
Preface to the second edition: September 1873
Since the publication of this work in 1871, translations have appeared in
German and Russian. In the present edition the form of page has been
slightly altered, for convenience of re-issue at once in England and
America. The matter, however, remains substantially the same. A few
passages have been amplified or altered for greater clearness, and on some
points additional or improved evidence has been put in. Among the
anthropologists whose published reviews or private communications have
enabled me to correct or strengthen various points, I will only mention by
name Professor Felix Liebrecht, of Liege, Mr. Clements R. Markham,
Professor Calderwood, Mr. Ralston, and Mr. Sebastian Evans.
It may have struck some readers as an omission, that in a work on
civilisation insisting so strenuously on a theory of development or
evolution, mention should scarcely have been made of Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Herbert Spencer, whose influence on the whole course of modern thought on
such subjects should not be left without formal recognition. This absence
of particular reference is accounted for by the present work, arranged on
its own lines, coming scarcely into contact of detail with the previous
works of these eminent philosophers.
An objection made by several critics as to the accumulation of evidence in
these volumes leads me to remark, with sincere gratification, that this
objection has in fact been balanced by solid advantage. The plan of
collecting wide and minute evidence, so that readers may have actually
before them the means of judging the theory put forward, has been justified
by the reception of the book, even in circles to whose views many of its
arguments are strongly adverse, and that in matters of the first
importance. Writers of most various philosophical and theological schools
now admit that the ethnological facts are real, and vital, and have to be
accounted for. It is not too much to say that a perceptible movement of
public opinion has here justified the belief that the English mind, not
readily swayed by rhetoric, moves freely under the pressure of facts.
E. B. T.
September, 1873.
...
(¶) Are there, or have there been, tribes of men so low in culture as
to have
no religious conceptions whatever? This is practically the question of the
universality of religion, which for so many centuries has been affirmed and
denied, with a confidence in striking contrast to the imperfect evidence on
which both affirmation and denial have been based. Ethnographers, if
looking to a theory of development to explain civilisation, and regarding
its successive stages as arising one from another, would receive with
peculiar interest accounts of tribes devoid of all religion. Here, they
would naturally say, are men who have no religion because their forefathers
had none, men who represent a pre-religious condition of the human race,
out of which in the course of time religious conditions have arisen. It
does not, however, seem advisable to start from this ground in an
investigation of religious development. Though the theoretical niche is
ready and convenient, the actual statue to fill it is not forthcoming.
...
(¶) The first requisite in a systematic study of the
religions of the lower
races, is to lay down a rudimentary definition of religion. By requiring in
this definition the belief in a supreme deity or of judgment after death,
the adoration of idols or the practice of sacrifice, or other
partially-diffused doctrines or rites, no doubt many tribes may be excluded
from the category of religious. But such narrow definition has the fault of
identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the
deeper motive which underlies them. It seems best to fall back at once on
this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum definition of
Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings. If this standard be applied to
the descriptions of low races as to religion, the following results will
appear. It cannot be positively asserted that every existing tribe
recognises the belief in spiritual beings, for the native condition of a
considerable number is obscure in this respect, and from the rapid change
or extinction they are undergoing, may ever remain so. It would be yet more
unwarranted to set down every tribe mentioned in history, or known to us
by the discovery of antiquarian relics, as necessarily having passed the
defined minimum of religion. Greater still would be the unwisdom of
declaring such a rudimentary belief natural or instinctive in all human
tribes of all times; for no evidence
[1958 Harper v.2 p.9]
justifies the opinion that man, known
to be capable of so vast an intellectual development, cannot have emerged
from a non-religious condition, previous to that religious condition in
which he happens at present to come with sufficient clearness within our
range of knowledge. It is desirable, however, to take our basis of enquiry
in observation rather than from speculation. Here, so far as I can judge
from the immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the
belief in spiritual beings appears among all low races with whom we have
attained to thoroughly intimate acquaintance ; whereas the assertion of
absence of such belief must apply either to ancient tribes, or to more or
less imperfectly described modern ones. The exact bearing of this state of
things on the problem of the origin of religion may be thus briefly stated.
Were it distinctly proved that non-religious savages exist or have existed,
these might be at least plausibly claimed as representatives of the
condition of Man before he arrived at the religious state of culture. It is
not desirable, however, that this argument should be put forward, for the
asserted existence of the non-religious tribes in question rests, as we
have seen, on evidence often mistaken and never conclusive. The argument
for the natural evolution of religious ideas among mankind is not
invalidated by the rejection of an ally too weak at present to give
effectual help. Non-religious tribes may not exist in our day, but the fact
bears no more decisively on the development of religion, than the
impossibility of finding a modern English village without scissors or books
or lucifer-matches bears on the fact that there was a time when no such
things existed in the land.
(¶) I propose here, under the name of
Animism, to investigate the deep-lying
doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of
Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic Philosophy. Animism is not a new
technical term, though now seldom used. From its special relation to the
doctrine
[1958 Harper v.2 p.10] of the soul, it will be seen to have a
peculiar
appropriateness to the view here taken of the mode in which theological
ideas have been developed among mankind. The word Spiritualism, though it
may be, and sometimes is, used in general sense, has this obvious defect to
us, that it has come the designation of a particular modern sect, who
indeed hold extreme spiritualistic views, but cannot be taken typical
representatives of these views in the world at large. The sense of
Spiritualism in its wider acceptation, the general belief in spiritual
beings, is here given to Animism.
(¶) Animism characterises tribes very low in the scale of humanity,
and thence
ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last
preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture.
Doctrines adverse to it, so largely held by individuals or schools, are
usually due not to early lowness of civilisation, but to later changes in
the intellectual course, to divergence from, or rejection of, ancestral
faiths ; and such newer developments do not affect the present enquiry as
to the fundamental religious condition of mankind. Animism is, in fact, the
groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that
of civilised men. And although it may at first sight seem to afford but a
bare and meagre definition of a minimum of religion, it will be found
practically sufficient; for where the root is, the branches will generally
be produced. It is habitually found that the theory of Animism divides into
two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first,
concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence
after the death or destruction of the body ; second, concerning other
spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held
to affect or control the events of the material world, and man's life here
and hereafter; and it being considered
[1958 Harper v.2 p.11] that they hold intercourse with
men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in
their existence 1 ads naturally, and it might almost be said inevitably,
sooner r later to active reverence and propitiation. Thus Animism in its
full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in
controlling deities and subordinate spirits, these doctrines practically
resulting in some kind of active worship. One great element of religion,
that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital
part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races. It
is not that these races have no moral sense or no moral standard, for both
are strongly marked among them, if not in formal precept, at least in that
traditional consensus of society which we call public opinion, according to
which certain actions are held to be good or bad, right or wrong. It is
that the conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and
powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the
lower. I propose here hardly to touch upon the purely moral aspects of
religion, but rather to study the animism of the world so far as it
constitutes, as unquestionably it does constitute, an ancient and
world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory and worship is the
practice. Endeavouring to shape the materials for an enquiry hitherto
strangely undervalued and neglected, it will now be my task to bring as
clearly as may be into view the fundamental animism of the lower races, and
in some slight and broken outline to trace its course into higher regions
of civilisation. Here let me state once for all two principal conditions
under which the present research is carried on. First, as to the religious
doctrines and practices examined, these are treated as belonging to
theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or
revelation ; in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion.
Second, as to the connexion between similar ideas and rites in the
religions of the savage and the civilised world. While dwelling at some
length on doctrines and ceremonies of the lower
[1958 Harper v.2 p.12]
races, and sometimes
particularising for special reasons the related doctrines and ceremonies of
the higher nations, it has not seemed my proper task to work out in detail
the problems thus suggested among the philosophies and creeds of
Christendom. Such applications, extending farthest from the direct scope of
a work on primitive culture, are briefly stated in general terms, or
touched in slight allusion, or taken for granted without remark. Educated
readers possess the information required to work out their general bearing
on theology, while more technical discussion is left to philosophers and
theologians specially occupied with such arguments.
(¶) The first branch of the subject to be considered is the doctrine
of human
and other Souls, an examination of which will occupy the rest of the
present chapter. What the doctrine of the soul is among the lower races,
may be explained in stating the animistic theory of its development. It
seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply
impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is
it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what
causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death ? In the second place, what
are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions ? Looking at
these two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably
made their first step by the obvious inference that every man has two
things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom, These two are
evidently in close connexion with the body,, the life as enabling it to
feel and think and act, the phantom as being its image or second self ;
both, also, are perceived to be things separable from the body, the life as
able to go away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing
to people at a distance from it. The second step would seem also easy for
savages to make, seeing how extremely difficult civilised men have found it
to unmake. It is merely to combine the life and the phantom. As both
belong to the body, why should they not also belong to one another, and
[1958 Harper v.2 p.13]
manifestations of one and the same soul?
...
Sacrifice
(¶) Sacrifice has its apparent origin in the same early period of
culture and
its place in the same
animistic scheme as prayer, with which through so long a range
of history it has been carried on in the closest connexion. As prayer is a
request made to a deity as if he were a man, so sacrifice is a gift made to
a deity as if he were a man. The human types of both may be studied
unchanged in social life to this day. The suppliant who bows before his
chief, laying a gift at his feet and making his humble petition, displays
the
anthropomorphic model and origin at once of sacrifice and
prayer. But sacrifice, though in its early stages as intelligible as prayer
is in early and late stages alike, has passed in the course of religious
history into transformed conditions, not only of the rite itself but of the
intention with which the worshipper performs it. And theologians, having
particularly turned their attention to sacrifice as it appears in the
higher religions, have been apt to gloss over with mysticism ceremonies
which, when traced ethnographically up from their savage forms, seem open
to simply rational interpretation. Many details of offerings have already
been given incidentally here, as a means of elucidating the nature of the
deities they are offered to. Moreover, a main part of the doctrine of
sacrifice has been anticipated in examining the offerings to spirits of the
dead, and indeed the ideal distinction between soul and deity breaks down
among the lower races, when it appears how often the deities receiving
sacrifice are themselves divine human souls. In now attempting to classify
sacrifice in its course through the religions of the world, it seems a
satisfactory plan to group the evidence as far as may be according to the
manner in which the offering is given by the worshipper, and received by
the deity. At the same time, the examples may be so arranged as to bring
into view the principal lines along which the rite has undergone
alteration. The ruder conception that the deity takes and values the
offering for itself, gives place on the one hand to the idea of mere homage
expressed by a gift, and on the other to the negative view
[1958 Harper v.2 p.462]
that the virtue lies in the worshipper depriving himself something prized.
These ideas may be broadly distinguished as the gift-theory, the
homage-theory, and the abnegation-theory. Along all three the usual
ritualist change may be traced, from practical reality to formal ceremony.
The originally valuable offering is compromised for a smaller tribute or a
cheaper substitute, dwindling at last to a mere trifling token or symbol.
(¶) The gift-theory, as standing on its own independent basis,
properly takes
the first place. That most childlike kind of offering, the giving of a gift
with as yet no definite thought how the receiver can take and use it, may
be the most primitive as it is the most rudimentary sacrifice. Moreover, in
tracing the history of the ceremony from level to level of culture, the
same simple unshaped intention may still largely prevail, and much of the
reason why it is often found difficult to ascertain what savages and
barbarians suppose to become of the food and valuables they offer to the
gods, may be simply due to ancient sacrificers knowing as little about it
as modern ethnologists do, and caring less. Yet rude races begin and
civilized races continue to furnish with the details of their sacrificial
ceremonies the key also to their meaning, the explanation of the manner in
which the offering is supposed to pass into the possession of the deity.
(¶) Beginning with cases in which this transmission is performed
bodily, it
appears that when the deity is the personal Water, Earth, Fire, Air, or a
fetish-spirit animating or inhabiting such element, he can receive and
sometimes actually consume the offerings given over to this material
medium. How such notions may take shape is not ill shown in the quaintly
rational thought noticed in old Peru, that the Sun drinks the libations
poured out before him; and in modern Madagascar, that the Angatra drinks
the arrack left for him in the leaf-cup. Do not they see the liquids
diminish from day to day? (1)
(1) Garcilaso de la Vega,' Commentaries Reales,' v. 19. Ellis,'
Madagascar, vol. i. p. 421.
The sacrifice to Water
[1958 Harper v.2 p.463]
is exemplified by Indians caught in a storm on the North American lakes,
who would appease the angry tempest-raising deity by tying the feet of a
dog and throwing it overboard. (1)
(1) Charlevoix, 'Nouv. Fr.' vol. i. p. 394. See also Smith, 'Virginia,'
in Pinkerton,' vol. xiii. p. 41.
The following case from Guinea well shows
the principle of such offerings. Once in 1693, the sea being unusually
rough, the headmen complained to the king, who desired them to be easy, and
he would make the sea quiet next day. Accordingly he sent his fetishman
with a jar of palm oil, a bag of rice and corn, a jar of pitto, a bottle of
brandy, a piece of painted calico, and several other things to present to
the sea. Being come to the seaside, he made a speech to it, assuring it
that his king was its friend, and loved the white men; that they were
honest fellows and came to trade with him for what he wanted ; and that he
requested the sea not to be angry, nor hinder them to land their goods ; he
told it, that if it wanted palm oil, his king had sent it some ; and so
threw the jar with the oil into the sea, as he did, with the same
compliment, the rice, corn, pitto, brandy, calico, &c. (2) Among the North
American Indians the Earth also receives offerings buried in it.
(2) Phillips in Astley's ' Voyages,' vol. ii. p. 411 ; Lubbock,' Origin of
Civilisation," p. 216. Bosman,' Guinea," in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 500.
Bastian in 'Ztschr. für Ethnologic,' 1869, p. 315.
The distinctness of idea with which such objects may be given is well shown
in a Sioux legend. The Spirit of the earth, it seems, requires an offering
from those who perform extraordinary achievements, and accordingly the
prairie gapes open with an earthquake before the victorious hero of the
tale; he casts a partridge into the crevice, and springs over.3
Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. ii. p. 75. See also Tanner, 'Narr.' p.
193, and above, p. 270.
One of the
most explicit recorded instances of the offering to the Earth is the
hideous sacrifice to the Earth-goddess among the Khonds of Orissa, the
tearing of the flesh of the human victim from the bones, the priest burying
half of it in a hole in the earth behind his back without looking round,
and each householder carrying off a particle to bury in like manner in his
favourite field. (1)
Macpherson, 'India', p.129
...
With a consistency of action so general as to amount to a mental law, it is
proved that among the lower races all over the world the operation of
outward events on the inward mind leads not only to statement of fact, but
to formation of myth. It gives no unimportant clues to the student of
mental history, to see by what regular processes myths are generated, and
how, growing by wear and increasing in value at secondhand, they pass into
pseudo-historic legend.
Poetry is full of myth, and he who will [533] understand
it analytically will do well to study it ethnographically. In so far as
myth, seriously or sportively meant, is the subject of poetry, and in so
far as it is couched in language whose characteristic is that wild and
rambling metaphor which represents the habitual expression of savage
thought, the mental condition of the lower races is the key to poetry - nor
is it a small portion of the poetic realm that these definitions cover.
Tylor, E.B. 1875 "Anthropology" A six part article in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
Part 6: Development of Civilisation
...
The teaching of history, during the three to four thousand years of which
contemporary chronicles have been preserved, is that civilisation is
gradually developed in the course of ages by enlargement and increased
precision of knowledge, invention and improvement of arts, and the
progression of social and political habits and institutions towards general
well-being. The conditions of such races as the older Jews, Greeks, and
Germans, are known to us by ancient chronicles, and by poetry and myth even
more valuable than chronicle in the details they unconsciously preserve of
the state of society at the time whence they have been handed down.
Starting from the recorded condition of such barbaric nations, and
following the general course of culture into the modern world, all the
great processes of mental an social development may be seen at work.
Falling back or decay also takes place, but only to a limited extent
destroys the results of growth in culture.
It is thus matter of actual record, that the ancestors of civilised nations
were barbaric tribes, and the inference seems reasonable that the same
process of development had gone on during previous ages outside the domain
of direct history, so that barbaric culture itself arose out of an earlier
and ruder condition of primitive culture, more or less corresponding with
the state of modern savage tribes.
The failure of direct record of this passage from savagery upward to
barbarism was to be expected from the circumstances of the case. No people
civilised enough to preserve history could have watched the age-long
process of a savage tribe developing its culture; indeed, experience shows
that independent progress could hardly have taken place among an
uncivilised in contact with a civilised race. Nor could a barbaric nation,
though it had really and independent risen from savagery within some few
thousand years, give any valid account of this gradual advancement, for the
very reason of its having taken place while the nation was yet in, or but
little removed from, the savage state, one part of the very definition of
which is that it has no trustworthy means of preserving the history of
events even for a single century, much less for the long period required
for so vast a development.
This view of the low origin and progressive development of civilisation was
already held in ancient times, as in the well-known speculations of the
Epicurean school on the condition of the earliest men, who roved like wild
animals, seeking their food from the uncultured earth, till arts and social
laws arose among them (Lucret., De Rerum Nat., v. 923; Horat., Sat., 1. 3);
or where the like idea has taken in China the form of ancient legend,
recording the time when their nation was taught to use skins for clothing,
to make fire and to dwell in houses (Pauthier, Livres Sacres de Orient, p.
26).
In opposition to such views of primeval rudeness, traditions of a pristine
state of human excellence have long been cherished, such as the "golden
age" (Hesiod., Op. et. Dies, 108).
Till of late wide acceptance has been given to arguments, partly based on
theological and partly on anthropological grounds, as to man's incapability
of rising from a savage state, and the consequent necessity of a
supernatural bestowal of culture on the first men, from whose high level
savages are supposed by advocates of this theory to have degenerated. The
anthropological evidence adduced in support of this doctrine is, however,
too weak for citation, and even obviously erroneous arguments have been
relied on (see, for example, Archbishop Whately, Essay on the Origin of
Civilisation, and remarks on its evidence in Tylor, Early Hist. Man, p.
163).
It has been especially the evidence of prehistoric archaeology which,
within the last few years, has given to the natural development-theory of
civilisation a predominance hardly disputed on anthropological grounds. The
stone implements, which form the staple proof of man's existence at the
period of the river-drift, are of extreme rudeness as compared even with
ordinary savage types, so that it is obvious that the most ancient known
tribes were, as to be industrial arts, at a low savage level. The remains
in the caverns justify this opinion, especially where in central France
more precision is given to the idea of prehistoric life by the discovery of
bone weapons for hunting and fishing, which suggest a rude condition
resembling that of the Esquimaux (see the preceding section IV., Antiquity
of Man). The finding of ancient stone implements buried in the ground in
almost every habitable district of the world, including the seats of the
great ancient civilisations, such as Egypt, Assyria, India, China, Greece,
&c., may be adduced to show that the inhabitants of these regions had at
some time belonged to the stone age. This argument goes far to prove that
the ancestors of all nations, high and low, were once in that uncultured
condition as to knowledge, arts, and manners generally, which within our
experience accompanies the use of stone implements and the want of metals.
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animism
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1871
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