Talk about your red pills. J.M. Robertson herein challenges not only the historical authenticity of the canonical accounts of the founding of Christianity, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. He answers the question implicit in Kersey Graves' 1875 screed, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. Why so many similar stories of savior figures in world religion?

At the dark heart of this mystery, according to Robinson, is a prehistoric drama involving human sacrifice (particularly, of children), cannibalism, and regicide. The purpose: to implore the gods, or to expiate collective sin. As time passed, the rituals were softened, and turned into symbolic equivalents (such as the scapegoat and the eucharist), while retaining the tragic end of the narrative. A culture hero, born under portents, dies, often under torture, in order to save all humanity. These and other tropes ended up embedded in our tales of the founders of major religions, from Buddha to Jesus.

Robertson pulls in historic, ethnographic and folklore data from hundreds of carefully cited sources. He covers examples from antiquity such as Mithraism, Manichaeism, and Apollonius of Tyana. In the final section he universalizes his study and focuses on Native America, particularly the Aztec. The conclusions of this book remain highly controversial, but the sheer mass of evidence accumulated demands consideration. This will be a thorny book for believers, but a revelation for free-thinkers.

--J.B. Hare, Feb. 10, 2008.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Since the first issue of this work in 1903, but especially within the past few years, its main positions have been brought into extensive discussion by other writers, notably in Germany, where the Christusmythe of Professor Arthur Drews has been the theme of many platform debates. The hypothesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God, first indicated in Christianity and Mythology, and further propounded in the first edition of this book, has received highly important and independent development at the hands of Professor W. Benjamin Smith in his Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906), and in the later exposition of Professor Drews. For one whose tasks include other busy fields, it is hardly possible to give this the constant attention it deserves; but the present edition has been as fully revised as might be; and some fresh elucidatory material has been embodied, without, however, any pretence of including the results of the other writers named.

Criticism of the book, so far as I have seen, has been to a surprising degree limited to subsidiary details. The first part, a discussion of the general principles and main results of hierology as regards the reigning religion, has been generally ignored, under circumstances which suggest rather avoidance than dissidence. But much more surprising is the general evasion of the two theses upon which criticism was specially challenged in the Introduction—the theses that the gospel story of the Last Supper, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection is demonstrably not originally a narrative, but a mystery-drama, which has been transcribed with a minimum of modification; and that the mystery-drama was inferribly an evolution from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was "Jesus the Son of the Father." Against this twofold position I have seen not a single detailed argument. Writers who confidently and angrily undertake to expose error in another section of the book pass this with at most a defiant shot. Like the legendary Scottish preacher, they recognise a "difficult passage, and, having looked it boldly in the face, pass on." Even Professor Schmiedel, to my surprise, abstains from

p. xii

argument on an issue of which his candour and acumen must reveal to him the gravity. It is but fair to say that even sympathetic readers do not often avow entire acquiescence. Professor Drews leaves this an open question. But I should have expected that such a proposition, put forward as capital, would have been dealt with by critics who showed themselves much concerned to discredit the book in general.

They seem to have been chiefly excited about Mithraism, either finding in the account of that ancient cultus a provocation which the other parts of the volume did not yield, or seeing there openings for hostile criticism which elsewhere were not patent. One Roman Catholic ecclesiastic has represented me as a "modern apostle" of the bull-slaying God. It would seem that a semblance, however illusory, of rivalry in cult propaganda is more evocative of critical conflict than any mere scientific disintegration of the current creed. Of the attacks upon the section "Mithraism," as well as of other criticisms of the book, I have given some account in Appendix C. It is to be regretted that it should still be necessary to make replies to criticisms in these matters consist largely of exposures of gross misrepresentation, blundering, bad faith, and bad feeling, as well as bad reasoning, on the part of theological critics. In the case of a hostile critique in the Hibbert Journal, which did not incur these characterisations, I made an amicable appeal for space in which to reply and set forth my own case; but my request was refused.

Broadly speaking, the critical situation is one of ferment rather than of decisive conflict. Those devoted Danaïdes, the professional theologians, continue their labours with the serious assiduity which has always marked them, exhibiting their learned results in dialectic vessels which lack the first elements of retention. The theologians are as much occupied with unrealities to-day, relatively to the advance of thought, and as sure of their own insight, as were their predecessors of three hundred years ago, expounding the functions of the devil. In Germany they are not yet done discussing the inner significance of the tale of Satan's carrying Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple or to a mountain top. Professor Zahn circumspectly puts it that Jesus felt himself so carried. Friedrich Spitta as circumspectly replies that that is not what the gospels say, but does not press that point to finality. Professor Harnack pronounces that the story in Matthew is the older. Spitta cogently proves that it is the later, and that Mark has minimised Luke. Wellhausen's theory of the priority of Mark he shows to be finally untenable; and his own conclusion he declares to give a decisive result as regards

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the life of Jesus—namely, that Jesus believed firmly in his Messiah-ship from the moment of his baptism onwards, and that he held by it in terms of his own inner experience of divine and fiendish influences. 1 And this is history, as written by scholarly theological experts. The fact that the whole Temptation story is rationally traceable to a Babylonian sculpture of the Goat-God beside the Sun-God, interpreted by Greeks and Romans successively as an education of Apollo or Jupiter by Pan on a mountain top, or a musical contest between them, has never entered the experts’ consciousness. They are writing history in the air. Spitta confidently decides that neither the community nor the disciples nor Paul set up the Messianic conception of Jesus; and yet he has not a word to say on the problem of Paul's entire ignorance of the Temptation story. Seventy years before, our own experts had ascertained with equal industry and certainty that "most probably our Lord was placed [by Satan] not on the sheer descent [from the temple] into the valley (Jos. War, V, v, 2; Ant. XV, xi, 5), but on the side next the court where stood the multitude to whom He might thus announce himself from Dan. vii, 13 (1 Chron. xxi, 16), see Bp. Pearson, VII, f. and g. Solomon's porch was a cross building to the temple itself, and rose 120 cubits above it. From the term used by both Evangelists, it is certain that the Tempter stood on no part (τοῦ ναοῦ) of the sanctuary." 2 Thus does the "expert" elucidation of the impossible go on through the generations. The "experts" of to-day are for the most part as far behind the historic science of their time as were their predecessors; and their results are just as nugatory as the older. But they are just as certain as were their predecessors that they are at the true point of view, and have all the historical facts in hand.

Orthodox and heterodox alike, in the undertaking to set forth the manner of the rise of Christianity, either wholly disregard the principles of historical proof or apply these principles arbitrarily, at their own convenience. Pfleiderer, latterly more and more bitterly repugning the interpretations of other scholars, alternately represented the personality of Jesus as a profoundly obscure problem, and offered fallacious elucidations thereof, with perfect confidence in his own selection of certainties. 3 Dr. Heinrici, offering a comprehensive view of Das Urchristentum (1902), ignores all historical difficulties on the score that he is discussing not the truth but the

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influence of Christianity, and so sets forth a copious account of the psychology of the Gospel Jesus which for critical science has no validity whatever. Dr. Schweitzer, in his Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Eng. trans., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910), after ably confuting all the current conceptions of the Founder, sets forth one which incurs fatal criticism as soon as it is propounded. 1

The old fashion of manipulating the evidences, on the other hand, is still practised from time to time even by distinguished experts like Professor Bousset, a scholar who has done original and important work in outlying provinces of research. But how little critical validity attaches to Bousset's vindication of the main Christian tradition has been crushingly set forth in thebrochure of the late Pastor Kalthoff, Was wissen wir von Jesus? (Lehmann, Berlin: 1904), in reply to Bousset's discourse under the same title. Professing, for instance, to found on such historical data as the mention of an otherwise unknown "Chrestus" by Suetonius, Bousset deliberately denaturalises the passage to suit his purpose, and then makes it vouch for a "Christian" community at Rome when none such can be shown to have existed. Kalthoff rightly likens such a handling of documents to the methods of the professed rationalisers denounced by Lessing in his day. Many of the "liberal" school of to-day are in fact at the standpoint of the semi-rationalist beginnings of Biblical criticism among the eighteenth-century deists; on behalf of whom we can but say that they were at least sincere pioneers, and that Lessing, in substituting for their undeveloped critical method the idea of a divine "Education of Mankind" through all religious systems alike, retrograded to a standpoint where the rational interpretation of history ceases to be possible, and where the critic stultifies himself by censuring processes of thought which, on his own principles, should be envisaged as part of the divine scheme of "education." Yet that nugatory formula in turn is pressed into the service of a theology which is consistent only in refusing to submit to scientific and logical tests.

Then we have the significant portent of the pseudo-biological school of the Rev. Mr. Crawley, 2 according to which nothing in religion is new and nothing true, but all is more or less productive of "vitality," and therefore precious, so that no critical analysis matters. Here the tribunals of historical and moral truth are brazenly closed; and the critical issue is referred to one commissioned for the instant by the defender of the faith, whose hand-to-mouth

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interpretations and generalisations of Christian history, worthy of a neophyte's essay, are complacently put forth as the vindication of beliefs and rites that are admittedly developments from mere savagery. And this repudiation of all intellectual morals, this negation of the very instinct of truth, is profusely flavoured with a profession of zeal for the morals of sex and the "instinct of life." Incidentally, too, an argument which puts all critical tests out of court is from time to time tinted with a suggestion of decent concern for historical research.

So, too, among the scholars who reconstruct Christian origins at will, some profess to apply a critical "method" or set of methods by which they can put down all challenges of the reality of their subject-matter. In Appendix C, I have shown what such "method" is worth in the hands of Professor Carl Clemen. Their general procedure is simply that of scholastics debatingin vacuo, assuming what they please, and rejecting what they please. It is the method by which whole generations of their predecessors elucidated the details of the sacerdotal system of the Hebrews in the wilderness, until Colenso—set doubting about sacred tradition by an intelligent Zulu—established arithmetically the truth of Voltaire's verdict that the whole thing was impossible. Then the experts, under cover of orthodox outcry, changed the venue, avowing no shame for their long aberration. In due time the modern specialists, or their successors, will realise that their main positions as to Christian origins are equally fabulous; but they or their successors will continue to be conscious of their professional perspicacity, and solemnly or angrily contemptuous of all lay criticism of their "method." "Wir Gelehrten vom Fach," they still call themselves in Germany—"we scholars by profession"—thus disposing of all lay criticism.

It is not surprising that alongside of this vain demonstration of the historicity of myth there spreads, among determined believers in the historicity, an uneasy disposition to ground faith on the very "to believe," called by the name of "spiritual experience." With a confidence equal to that of the professional documentists, such believers maintain that their own spiritual autobiographies can establish the historical actuality of what rationalist critics describe as ancient myths. "The heart answers, I have felt." Some of these reasoners, proceeding on the lines of the pseudo-Paul (1 Cor. ii), dispose inexpensively of the historical critic by calling him "impercipient." They themselves are the percipients "vom Fach." Other apologists, with a little more modesty, reiterate their conviction that

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the Christian origins must have been what they have been accustomed to think—that no religious movement can have risen without a revered Founder, and that the spread and duration of the Christian movement prove its Founder to have been a very great personality indeed. Abstractly put, such a theorem logically ends in the bald claim of the theorist to special "percipience," and a denial of percipience to all who refuse their assent.

It has latterly come to be associated, however, with an appeal to historical analogy in the case of the modern Persian movement of the Bâb, the lessons of which in this connection have been pressed upon orthodox believers by the late Mr. Herbert Rix. Mr. Rix, whose personality gave weight and interest to all his views, seems to have set out as a Unitarian preacher with a fixed belief in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, despite a recognition of the weakness of the historical basis. Noting "with what a childlike mind those ancient Christians came to all questions of external fact—how independent of external fact the truth they lived by really was," 1 he yet assumed that any tale passed on by such believers must have had a basis in a great personality. "Those gospel stories," he wrote, "come down to us by tradition handed on by the lips of ignorant peasants, so that we can never be quite sure that we have the precise truth about any incident." 2 Here both the positive and the negative assumptions are invalid. We do not know that all the gospel stories were passed on by peasants; and we never know whether there was any historical basis whatever for any one tale. But on such assumptions Mr. Rix founded an unqualified conviction that the Gospel Jesus "headed a new spiritual era," "altered the whole face of things," "gave us a new principle to live by," and "revolutionised the whole world of human affection"; 3 and in his posthumous work, Rabbi, Messiah, and Martyr(1907), he presents one more Life of Jesus framed on the principle of excluding the supernatural and taking all the rest of the gospels as substantially true.

Yet towards the close of his life he seems to have realised either that this process was illicit or that it could not claim acceptance on historical grounds. Writing on the Bâb movement, he speaks not only of "those belated theologians who still think the case of a supernatural Christianity can be historically proved by evidence drawn from the latter part of the first century," but of the "utter insecurity of the historical foundation" of Christianity; and he avows "how hopeless it is to try to base religion upon historical

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documents." 1 Then comes the exposition of how the Bâb movement rose in the devotion evoked by a remarkable personality; and how within thirty years the original account of the Founder was so completely superseded by a legendary account, full of miracles, that only one copy of the original document, by a rare chance, has survived.

The argument now founded on this case is an attempt to salve the historicity of Jesus in surrendering the records. Renan pointed to the Bâb movement as showing how an enthusiastic cult could arise and spread rapidly in our own day by purely natural forces. Accepting that demonstration, the Neo-Unitarians press the corollary that the Bâb movement shows how rapidly myth can overgrow history, and that we have now a new analogical ground for believing that Jesus, like the Bâb, was an actual person, of great persuasive and inspiring power. But while the plea is perfectly reasonable, and deserves every consideration, it is clearly inconclusive. Cult beginnings are not limited to one mode; and the fatal fact remains that the beginnings of the Christist cult are wrapped in all the obscurity which surrounds the alleged Founder, while we have trustworthy contemporary record of the beginnings of the Bâb movement. Place the two cases beside that of the Bacchic cult in Greece, and we have a cult-type in which wild devotion is given to a wholly mythical Founder. The rationalist critic does not affirm the impossibility of an evolution of the Christist movement on the lines of that of the Bâb: he leaves such à priori reasoning to the other side, simply insisting that there is no good historical evidence whatever, while there are strong grounds for inferring a mythical foundation. And those who abstractly insist on the historicity of Jesus must either recede from their position or revert to claims expressive merely of the personal equation—statements of the convincing force of their "religious experience," or claims to a special faculty of "percipience." To all such claims the sufficient answer is that, arrogance apart, they are matched and cancelled by similar claims on the part of believers in other creeds; and that they could have been advanced with as much justification by ancient believers in Dionysos and Osiris, who had no more doubt of the historicity of their Founders than either an orthodox or a Unitarian Christian has to-day concerning the historicity of Jesus. In short, the closing of historical problems by insistence on the personal equation is no more permissible among intellectual freemen than the settling of scientific

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questions thereby. Callous posterity, if not contemporary criticism, ruthlessly puts aside the personal equation in such matters, and reverts to the kind of argument which proceeds upon common grounds of credence and universal canons of evidence.

And this reversion is now in process. Already the argument for the historicity of the main gospel narrative is being largely grounded even by some "experts" on the single datum of the mention of "brethren of the Lord," and "James the brother of the Lord," in two of the Pauline epistles. This thesis is embodied in one of the ablest arguments on the historicity question that I have met with. It was put in a letter to me by a lay correspondent, open-mindedly seeking the truth by fair critical tests. He began by arguing that the data of a "Paul party," a "Cephas party," and an "Apollos party" in Corinth, if accepted as evidence for the personalities of the three party-leaders named, carry with them the inference of a Christ of whom some logia were current. If then the writer of the epistle—whether Paul or another—ignored such logia, the "silence of Paul" is no argument for ignorance of such logia in general. This ingenious argument, I think, fails in respect of its unsupported premiss. Christists might call themselves "of Christ" simply by way of disavowing all sectarian leadership. On the face of the case, the special converts of Paul were Christists without any logic of Christ to proceed upon. Equally ingenious, but I think equally inconclusive, is the further argument that the challenge, "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cor. ix, 1), implies that Paul's status was discredited on the score that he had not seen the Lord, while other apostles had. But the dispute here turns finally on the question of the authenticity of the epistle as a whole, or the chapter or the plea in particular. As coming from Paul, it is a weak plea: multitudes were said to have "seen" Jesus; the apostle would have claimed, if anything, authorisation by Jesus. But as a traditional claim it is intelligible enough. Now, this portion of the epistle is one of those most strongly impugned by the tests of Van Manen as betraying a late authorship and standpoint—that of ecclesiastics standing for their income and their right to marry. The conception of Paul battling against his converts for his salary and "the right to lead about a wife," within a few pages of his declaration (vii, 8-9) to the unmarried and to widows, "It is good for them if they abide even as I; but if they have not continency, let them marry"—this is staggering even to believers in the authenticity of "the four" or all of the epistles, and gives the very strongest ground for treating the irreconcilable passage in chapter ix,

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if not the whole chapter, as a subsequent interpolation. That the same hand penned both passages is incredible.

Thus we come to the "brethren of the Lord" with an indestructible presumption against the text. They are mentioned as part of the case for that claim to marry which is utterly excluded by chapter vii. And the claim for salaries and freedom to marry is as obviously likely to be the late interpolation as is the doctrine of asceticism to be the earlier. Given then the clear lateness of the passage, what does the phrase "brethren of the Lord" prove? That at a period presumably long subsequent to that of Paul there was a tradition of a number of Church leaders or teachers so named. Who were they? They are never mentioned in the Acts. They are never indicated in the gospels. Brethren of Jesus are there referred to (Mt. xii, 46, xiii, 55; Mk. iii, 31, 32; Lk. viii, 19, 20; Jn. vii, 3, 5, 10); but, to say nothing of the facts that three of these passages are plainly duplicates, and that only in one are any of the brethren named, there is never the slightest suggestion that any one of them joined the propaganda. On the contrary, it is expressly declared that "even his brethren did not believe on him" (Jn. vii, 5). How then, on that basis, supposing it to have a primary validity, are we to accept the view that the James of Gal. i, 19, was a uterine brother or a half-brother of the Founder, who before Paul's advent had come to something like primacy in the Church, without leaving even a traditional trace of him as a brother of Jesus in the Acts?

Either the gospel data are historically decisive or they are not. By excluding them from his "pillar texts" 1 Professor Schmiedel admits that they are bound up with the supernatural view of Jesus. The resort to the argument from the epistles is a partial confession that the whole gospel record is open to doubt; and that the specification of four brothers and several sisters of Jesus in one passage is a perplexity. It has always been so. Several Fathers accounted for them as children of Joseph by a former wife; several others made them children of Clopas and "the other" Mary, and so only cousins of Jesus. If the gospel record is valid evidence, the question is at an end. If it is not, the evidence from the epistles falls. "Brethren of the Lord" is a late allusion, which may stand for a mere tradition or may tell of a group name; and the mention of James as a "brother" (with no hint of any others) in the epistle to the Galatians can perfectly well be an interpolation, even supposing the epistle to be genuine.

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I have here examined the whole argument because it is fully the strongest known to me on the side of the historicity of Jesus; and I am concerned to evade nothing. The candid reader, I think, will admit that even if he holds by the historicity it cannot be established on the grounds in question. He will then, I trust, bring an open mind to bear on the whole reasoning of the Second Part of the ensuing treatise.

As in the case of the second edition of Christianity and Mythology I am deeply indebted to Mr. Percy Vaughan for carefully reading the proofs of these pages, and revising the Index.

April, 1911.

Footnotes

xiii:1 Die Versuchung Jesu, in Bd. iii, H. 2, of Zur Geschichte and Literatur des Urchristentums, 1907, pp. 92-3.

xiii:2 Notes on the Four Gospels, etc., 1838, p. 220.

xiii:3 See the Appendix to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology.

xiv:1 See Appendix last cited.

xiv:2 See Appendix C to the present volume.

xvi:1 Sermons, Addresses, and Essays, 1907, p. 1.

xvi:2 Id. p. 107.

xvi:3 Id. p. 5.

xvii:1 Id. pp. 295-6, 300.

xix:1 For an examination of these I may refer the reader to the Appendix to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology.

PART I.

THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURALNESS OF ALL BELIEF

§ 1.

It seems probable, despite theological cavils, that Petronius was right in his signal saying, Fear first made the Gods. In the words of a recent hierologist, "we may be sure that primitive man took to himself the credit of his successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his own advantage, but when the machinery did not work he ascribed the fault to some over-ruling supernatural power.....It was the violation of [previously exploited] sequences, and the frustration of his expectations, by which the belief in supernatural power was, not created, but first called forth." 1

The fact that this writer proceeds to repudiate his own doctrine 2 is no reason why we should, save to the extent of noting the temerity of his use of the term "supernatural." There are some very strong reasons, apart from the à priori one cited above, for thinking that the earliest human notions of superhuman beings were framed in terms of fear. Perhaps the strongest of all is the fact that savages and barbarians in nearly all parts of the world appear to regard disease and death as invariably due to purposive hostile action, whether normal, magical, or "spiritual." 3 Not even old age is for

p. 2

many of these primitive thinkers a probable natural cause of death. 1 If then the life of early man was not much less troublous than that of contemporary primitives, he is likely to have been moved as much as they to conceive of the unseen powers as malevolent. "On the Gold Coast," says a close student, "the majority of these spirits are malignant......I believe that originally all were conceived as malignant." 2

And how, indeed, could it be otherwise? Those who will not assent have forgotten, as indeed most anthropologists strangely forget when they are discussing the beginnings of religion, that man as we know him is descended from something less human, more brute, something nearer the predatory beast life of fear and foray.

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[paragraph continues]When in the period of upward movement which we term civilisation, as distinct from animal savagery, there could arise thrills of yearning or gratitude towards unknown powers, we are æons off from the stage of subterhuman growth in which the germs of conceptual religion must have stirred. If the argument is to be that there is no religion until man loves his Gods, let it be plainly put, and let not a verbal definition become a petitio principii. If, again, no numina are to be termed Gods but those who are loved, let that proposition too be put as a simple definition of term. But if we are to look for the beginnings of the human notion of numina, of unseen spirits who operate in Nature and interfere with man, let it be as plainly put that they presumably occurred when fear of the unknown was normal, and gratitude to an Unknown impossible.

But in saying that fear first made the Gods, or made the first Gods, we imply that other God-making forces came into play later; and no dispute arises when this is affirmed of the process of making the Gods of the higher religions, in their later forms. Even here, at the outset, the play of gratitude is no such ennobling exercise as to involve much lifting of the moral standpoint; and even in the higher religions gratitude to the God is often correlative with fear of the evil spirits whom he wards off. This factor is constantly present in the gospels and in the polemic of the early Fathers; 1 and has never disappeared from religious life. The pietist who in our own day pours out thanks to "Providence" for saving him in the earthquake in which myriads have perished is no more ethically attractive than philosophically persuasive; and the gratitude of savages and barbarians for favours received and expected can hardly have been more refined. It might even be said that a cruder egoism presides over the making of Good Gods than over the birth of the Gods of Fear; 2 the former having their probable origin in an individualistic as against a tribal instinct. But it may be granted that the God who ostensibly begins as a private guardian angel or family spirit may become the germ of a more ethical cultus than that of the God generically feared. And the process chronically recurs. There is, indeed, no generic severance between the Gods of fear and the Gods of love, most deities of the more advanced races having both aspects: nevertheless, certain specified deities are so largely shaped by men's affections that they might recognisably be termed the Beloved Gods.

p. 4

It will on the whole be helpful to an understanding of the subject if we name such Gods, in terms of current conceptions, the Christs of the world's pantheon. That title, indeed, no less fitly includes figures which do not strictly rank as Gods; but in thus widely relating it we shall be rather elucidating than obscuring religious history. Only by some such collocation of ideas can the inquirer surmount his presuppositions and take the decisive step towards seeing the religions of mankind as alike man-made. On the other hand, he is not thereby committed to any one view in the field of history proper; he is left free to argue for a historical Christ as for a historical Buddha.

Even on the ground of the concept of evolution, however, scientific agreement is still hindered by persistence in the old classifications. The trouble meets us on one line in arbitrary fundamental separations between mythology and religion, early religion and early ethics, religion and magic, genuine myths and non-genuine myths. 1 On another line it meets us in the shape of a sudden and local reopening of the problem of theistic intervention in a quasi-philosophical form, or a wilful repudiation of naturalistic method when the inquiry reaches current beliefs. Thus results which were reached by disinterested scholarship a generation ago are sought to be subverted, not by a more thorough scholarship, but by keeping away from the scholarly problem and suggesting a new standard of values, open to no rational tests. It may be well, therefore, to clear the ground so far as may be of such dispute at the outset by stating and vindicating the naturalistic position in regard to it.

Footnotes

1:1 F. B. Jevons, Introduction, to the History of Religion, 1896, p. 19; cp. p. 23, p. 137, and p. 177. Cp. Adam Smith, essay onThe History of Astronomy, sect. iii.

1:2 Jevons, as cited pp. 106, 233, 410. Exactly the same self-contradiction is committed by Professor Robertson Smith, on the same provocation of the phrase, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. See his Religion of the Semites, pp. 27, 35, 55, 88, 129.

1:3 Cp. John Mathew, Eaglehawk and Crow, 1899, pp. 91, 123, 144; Sir A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, pp. 13-14; Livingstone, Travels and Researches in South Africa, ed. 1905, p. 409; Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 144-5; Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 171-sq., 361; Mary H. Kingsley, West African Studies, ed. 1901, pp. 98-100, 105-9, 178; Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899, p. 48;Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904, p. 479; Rev. R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui: or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, p. 137; w. w. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56-57, 94, 410, 533 sq.; J. Chalmers, Pioneer Life and Work in New Guinea, 1895, p. 199; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, iii. 275; iv, 53, p. 19, 160; vii, 350, etc.; Admiral Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, pp 184-5 363; A. R. Wallace, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 2nd ed. 1889, pp. 347-8; A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia, 1894, p. 20; G. Taplin, The Narrinyeri: An Account of the Tribes of South Australian Aborigines, 2nd ed. Adelaide, p. 2 1878, pp. 19, 25; Perceval Landon, Lhasa, 2nd ed. 1905, p. 39; W. A. Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa, 1898, pp. 73, 75; Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 21, 321; A. E. Pratt, Two Years among the New Guinea Cannibals, 1906, p. 312; Paul Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 166; Lionel Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, pp. 75, 152; Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, Eng. tr. 1821, ii, 84; W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 395-6; iv, 293, 315; Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, 1892, pp. 195, 199; B. Douglas Howard, Life with Trans-Siberian Savages, 1893, p. 193; Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, ii, 106sq., 116 sq.; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 138; E. Clodd, Tom Tit Tot, 1898, pp. 133-4; E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902. pp. 18-22, 26-28; Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 100; N. W. Thomas, art. in Journal of the African Society, October, 1908, p. 24; D. M. Kranz, Natur- and Kulturleben der Zulus, 1880, p. 106; S. P. Oliver, Madagascar, 1886, ii, 39.

At a higher stage of civilisation, or among tribes who have had some contact with white men, we find a differentiation in which medical treatment is recognised, and only the obscurer maladies or dangerous wounds are magically dealt with. Cp. Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 420, with Miss Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 153, and Brine, as cited, p. 174.

It cannot be said that this view of disease was transcended among the most civilised nations of antiquity, the scientific views of the Greek physicians being accepted only by the few. Under Christianity there was a nearly complete reversion to the savage view, which subsisted until the assimilation of Saracen science in the Middle Ages. Cp. Mosheim's notes to Cudworth's Intellectual System, Harrison's trans. 1845, ii, 284-6; A. D. White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1897, ii, i, 3, 25, and refs.

2:1 In some cases old age is recognised as a sufficient cause. Cp. Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 164; Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, 1876, p. 35; Decle, as cited, pp. 489, 491; Crawley, as cited, p. 26.

2:2 A. B. Ellis, as cited, p. 12. Cp. Schweinfurth, as cited, and Major Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 384: Beneficent spirits are almost unknown to the pessimistic African, to whom existence must seem a veritable struggle." "Their [the Matabele's] idea of power, known or unknown, is always associated with evil" (Decle, as cited, p. 165: cp. pp. 153, 343). To the same effect W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i, 336; Rev. R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, as cited, and p. 104; Livingstone, Travels and Researches, ed. 1905, pp. 405, 409-10; Calvert, as cited, p. 38; Perceval Landon, Lhasa, 2nd ed. 1905, ii, 36-38, 40; Hyades and Deniker, Mission Scientif. du Cap Horn, 1891, cited by Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, 1906, i, 46; T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, pp. 189, 155; H. Cayley Webster, Through New Guinea and the Cannibal Countries, 1898, p. 357; Lawes, cited in C. Lennox's James Chalmers of New Guinea, 1903, p. 76; Joh. Warneck, Die Religion der Batak, 1909, pp. 2-3. The last-cited writer is particularly emphatic as to the overwhelming predominance of the factor of fear in the religion which he presents: "Diese Furcht, nicht die Pietät, nicht das Abhängigkeitsgefühl von der Gottheit, ist die treibende Kraft......" Of the ancient Roman, again, it can be said that "he was beset on all sides by imaginary foes" (Professor Granger, The Worship of the Romans, 1895, p. 75). The same statement can be made with nearly the same emphasis concerning the population of Christian Greece. See J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, 1910, pp. 9-25, 47, 256, and passim. And as the common folk of Christian Greece are very much on the pagan plane of thought (id. p. 51), the inference as to pagan Greece is clear. Cp. G. Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, 1869, i, 20, and Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, pp. 34, 171; Sir H. Johnston, George Grenfell and the Congo, 1908, ii, 635-6; K. Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North, 1908, pp. 123-5; Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. 1908, pp. 7, 9; Thurston, Castes and Tribes, as cited, ii, 86, 180, 215, 427; vii, 354. Mr. Decle notes one or two African exceptions; e.g., a tribe on the Tanganika plateau "have a vague sort of Supreme Being called Lesa, who has good and evil passions" (p. 293); the Wakamba have a similar conception, and are further notable for not believing that death is caused by witchcraft (p. 489); and the Wanyamwezi have "the idea of a superior being whose help might be invoked" (p. 316). The exceptions all occur in the lake region. Cp. Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 169.

3:1 Cp. Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, L. 48-52, ii, 11; Lactantius, Div. Inst. iv, 15; Tertullian, Apol. 23, 40; Augustine, De Civ. Dei, B. passim.

3:2 This is said in a different sense from that of the proposition of Miss Harrison (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed, pp, xii and 6) that the religion of fear of evil has ethical value as recognising the "mystery" thereof.

4:1 Cp. the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 2.

3.

At the close of his work, apparently forgetting the propositions of his first chapter as to the priority of the sense of obstacle in the primitive man's notion of supernatural forces, Dr. Jevons affirms that the "earliest attempt" towards harmonising the facts of the "external and inner consciousness"—by which is meant observation and reflection

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Here we have either a contradiction of the thesis before cited, or a resort to the extremely arbitrary assumption that in taking credit to himself for successful management of things, and imputing his miscarriages to a superior power, the primitive man is not trying to "harmonise the facts of his experience." Such an argument would be on every ground untenable; but it appears to be all that can stand between Dr. Jevons and self-contradiction. The way to a sound position is by settling impartially the definition of the term "religion." How Dr. Jevons misses this may be gathered from the continuation of the passage under notice:—

[paragraph continues]As we have seen, Dr. Jevons himself had at the outset plainly posited what he now describes as a fallacious assumption. On his prior showing, man's experience of apparent hostility in Nature "first called forth" his belief in supernatural power. The interposed phrase, "was not created but," looks like an after attempt to reconcile the earlier proposition with the later. But there is no real reconciliation, for Dr. Jevons thus sets up only the vain suggestion that the primitive man was from the first conscious of the existence of good supernatural powers but did not think they did him any good—another collapse in countersense—or else the equally unmanageable notion that primitive man recognised helpful supernatural being-, but was not grateful to them for their help.

That the argument has not been scientifically conducted is further clear from the use now of the expression "superstitious dread" as the equivalent of "fear," while "grateful worship" stands for "satisfaction." Why "superstitious dread" and not "superstitious gratitude"? A scientific inquiry will treat the phenomena on a moral par, and will at this stage simply put aside the term "superstition." It is relevant only as imputing a superior degree of gratuitousness of belief (whether by way of fear or of satisfaction) at a comparatively

p. 9

advanced state of culture. To call a savage superstitious when he fears a God, and religious when he thanks one, is not only to warp the "science of religion" at the start, but to block even the purpose in view, for, as we have seen, Dr. Jevons is constrained by his own motive of edification to assume that the benignant God ought by rights to be sometimes feared.

Footnotes

8:1 Work cited, p. 410.

 5.

The need for an understanding becomes pressing when we compare with the conceptions of Dr. Jevons those of Dr. J. G. Frazer, as set forth in the revised edition of his great work, The Golden Bough. Having before the issue of his first edition "failed, perhaps inexcusably," he modestly avows, "to define even to myself my notion of religion," he was then "disposed to class magic loosely under it as one of its lower forms." Now he has "come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion." 3 On this view he defines religion as "a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. In this sense," he adds, "it will readily be perceived that religion is opposed in principle both to magic and to science." 4

The first comment on such a proposition is that it all depends on what you mean by "principle." If religion means only the act of propitiation and conciliation of certain alleged powers, its principle "may be placed either in the hope that such propitiation will succeed or in the feeling that it ought to be tried. In either case, the accuracy of the proposition is far from clear. But we

p. 12

must widen the issue. It will be seen that Dr. Frazer's formal definition of religion is as inadequate as that implied in the argument of Dr. Jevons, though his practical handling of the case is finally the more scientific. On the above definition, beliefis no part of religion; 1 and neither is gratitude; though fear may be held to be implied in propitiation. Further, religion has by this definition nothing to do with ethics; and even conduct shaped by way of simple obedience to a God's alleged commands is barely recognised under the head of "propitiation." Finally, a theist who has ever so reverently arrived at the idea of an All-wise Omnipotence which needs not to be propitiated or conciliated, has on Dr. Frazer's definition ceased to be religious. It will really not do.

I am not here pressing for a wider definition, as do some professed rationalists, by way of securing for my own philosophy or ethic the prestige of a highly respectable name; nor do I even endorse their claim as for themselves. I simply urge that as a matter of scientific convenience and consistency the word must be allowed to cover at least the bulk of the phenomena to which it has immemorially been applied. Where Dr. Frazer by his definition makes religion "nearly unknown" to the Australian, because the Australian (mainly for lack of the wherewithal) does not sacrifice, 2 Mr. Lang ascribes to them a higher or deeper religious feeling on that very account. 3 Such chaos of definition must be averted by a more comprehensive theory. Whether or not we oppose magic to religion, we cannot exclude from the latter term the whole process of non-propitiatory religious ethic, of thanksgiving ritual, and of cosmological doctrine. Later we shall have to deal with Dr. Jevons’s attempt to withdraw the term from theistic philosophy and from mythology; but we may provisionally insist that emotional resignation to "the divine will" is in terms of all usage whatsoever a religious phenomenon.

It remains to consider the alleged severance between religion and magic. It is interesting to find Dr. Jevons and Dr. Frazer here partially at one, as against the general opinion of anthropologists. That may be cited from a theologian, Professor T. W. Davies, in whose doctoral thesis on Magic, Divination, and Demonology—a performance both learned and judicious—it is argued that "all

p. 13

magic is a sort of religion." 1 Dr. Frazer, while agreeing with Dr. Jevons that they are "opposed," differs from him in holding that magic preceded religion; and by an odd fatality Dr. Frazer contradicts himself as explicitly as does Dr. Jevons. After avowing the belief that in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion," 2 he also avows that the antagonism between the two

Proceeding with his ostensible support of the thesis that magic preceded religion, Dr. Frazer, in his admirably learned way, gives us fresh illustrations of the "same confusion of magic and religion" in civilised and uncivilised peoples. 4 From Dr. Oldenberg he cites the observation that

From Sir Gaston Maspero he accepts the weighty reminder that in regard to ancient Egypt

A closely similar state of things is seen in the practice of the Maoris, who, when using coercive spells "to compel the Gods to

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yield to their wishes, added sacrifices and offerings at the same time to appease as it were their anger for being thus constrained." And the missionary who on these data represents the Maoris as rather coercing their Gods than praying to them, puts their usage on all fours with that of many French Catholics. 1

To all this, obviously, Dr. Jevons may reply that it does not prove the priority of magic to religion. 2 Neither, however, does it give any basis for Dr. Jevons’s thesis of the secondariness of magic. It simply sets forth that in the earliest available records, as in the practice of contemporary savages, magic so-called and propitiatory religion so-called co-exist and cohere. In Dr. Frazer's own words, they were not yet differentiated from each other—differentiated, that is, in the moral estimate of priest and worshipper. But in the terms of the proposition, the practice of propitiation was there; and there is nothing to show that it was a late variation on confident magic. On the other hand, the documentary evidence, so far as it goes, is in favour of the priority of magic so-called. "The magical texts formed the earliest sacred literature of Chaldæa. This fact remains unshaken." 3

What, then, becomes of the argument that magic and religion so-called are "opposed" because they are logically inconsistent with each other? Like Dr. Jevons, Dr. Frazer makes a good deal of the theoretic analogy of magic with science, both being alleged to rest upon the assumption of the "uniformity of nature" and "the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically." 4Now, while we need not hesitate to see in magic in particular, even as in religion in general, man's early gropings towards science, we must not let ourselves be by a mere verbalism confused as to what magic is. Obviously it does not assume the uniformity of nature; inasmuch as it assumes to control nature by different devices, framing

p. 15

new procedures where the old fail. It does not even invariably assume strict uniformity in the magical processus itself; but that is the one sort of uniformity of cause and effect that the magician as approaches to conceiving. Now, this conception connects much less with that of what we may term the normal relation of man to nature than with that of his relation to the sets of forces apprehended by late thought as "spiritual," but by early thought merely as unseen. Early man, presumably, had a normal notion of the process of breaking a stone or killing a foe; and there if anywhere lay the beginnings of his science. As Adam Smith put it, "Fire burns and water refreshes, heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters." 1 As Comte put it, primitive man never made a god of weight. 2 But even as he thought the invisible or inferrible personalities could do many kinds of "great" things, so he thought that, by taking pains, he could; inasmuch as he never clearly differentiated them from himself in nature and capacity. Thus his magic was part of his way of thinking about what was for him the "occult" or inferred side of things, which way of thinking as a whole was his religion. To speak in terms of Dr. Jevons’s primary position, he was as magician interfering with the sequences of nature as he supposed the occult personalities did.

On yet another ground, we are disallowed from charging inconsistency on primitive or ancient religious thought in respect of divergences from later conceptions. One of the more notable of those divergences is the idea that the Gods themselves are subject to the course of Nature, or the law of Fate: it is reached by modern Native Americans, 3 as it was by some ancient Egyptians, 4 and it stands out from the religious speculation of ancient Greece. 5 In both stages it is compatible with propitiation; and yet it gives a quasi-logical basis for the resort to magic, regarded as a temporary circumvention of the law of things. So with the belief in opposed deities: even if

p. 16

none be regarded as evil, like Ahriman, there is nothing specially inconsistent in a magic that seeks to employ a power of which, in the terms of the case, no deity has a monopoly. On this basis polytheism offers an easy way out of the indictment for inconsistency. When Porphyry asked Abammon, "Does not he who says he will burst the heavens, or reveal the secrets of Isis, or expose the arcanum in the adytum, or scatter the members of Osiris to Typhon—does not he who says this, by thus threatening what he knows not and cannot do, prove himself grossly foolish?"—the sage answers with confidence that such threats are used against not any of the celestial Gods but a lower order of powers, and that the theurgist commands these "as existing superior to them in the order of the Gods," and possessing power "through a union with the Gods" in virtue of his magic. 1

That is, of course, a late and sophisticated account of the matter the earlier theologian simply did not realise that any charge of inconsistency could arise. In any case, the Old Testament abounds in cases of sympathetic magic: the sprinkling of the blood of the hallowed sacrifice upon the ears and thumbs and toes of the priests; 2 the holding up of the arms of Moses, 3 in the attitude of the Sun-God and War-God Mithra, 4 to sway the battle; the sending forth of the scape-goat; 5 the blowing of the trumpets before the walls of Jericho; 6 the raising of the widow's son by Elijah, "stretching himself upon the child three times" 7—all these are acts neither of prayer nor of propitiation, but of sympathetic magic, "which is the germ of all magic"; and the theorist may be defied to show that they stood for a "degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion." 8 If, indeed, he could show it, he would be putting a rod in pickle for his theory of the super-excellence of Hebrew monotheism, which evolved itself with these accompaniments.

The early priest, then, is to be called inconsistent in his resort to magic only on the view that he had the definite modern conception of the Omnipotence of a supernatural power; and this he simply had not. It is, then, quite beside the case to argue, as does even Dr. Frazer, 9 that "the fatal flaw of magic lies in its total misconception of the particular laws which govern" natural sequences. That is not a differentiation between magic and religion; for the "religious" conception that nature is to be affected by propitiating

p. 17

unseen powers is just as fatally wrong; and it arose in the same fashion by "association of ideas," men assuming that nature was ruled by a personality like themselves. Why, then, is the "flaw" dwelt upon? If it be to prepare for the view that at a certain stage a portion of mankind began to "abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake themselves to religion instead," 1 the answer is that on Dr. Frazer's own showing men for whole ages practised both concurrently; 2 and that in the terms of the case they are as likely to have taken to magic because prayer failed as vice versa. Dr. Frazer, indeed, only diffidently suggests that "a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account." But by his own showing he has no right to this hypothesis even on an avowal of diffidence. As well might the contrary theory of Dr. Jevons be supported by the suggestion that the inherent falsehood and barrenness of the theory of prayer and propitiation set the more resourceful part of mankind on a more effectual control of nature by way of magic. 3 Had not men all along been trying both?

Equally untenable, surely, is the distinction drawn by Dr. Frazer 4 between "the haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs," and the attitude of the priest "with his awful sense of the divine majesty and his humble prostration in presence of it." Dr. Frazer can hardly mean to be ironical; but his words may very well serve to convey such a sense when applied to the attitude of the priesthoods of all ages, Brahmanical 5 or Papal, Semitic or Aryan. It would be difficult to distinguish in the matter of modesty between Moses 6and the magicians of Pharaoh, or Samuel and the Witch of Endor, or Elijah and the priests of Baal, or an excommunicating and flag-blessing bishop and an incantating wizard.

p. 18

[paragraph continues]All the while we have Dr. Frazer's own assurance that for long ages the priest was the magician.

If, seeking to form a just judgment, we turn to actual evidence for the attitude of the primitive magician, it lies to our hand in Livingstone's account of the negro rain-doctors of Bechuanaland. Here we have a typical dialogue between the missionary and the magician. The latter complained in friendly fashion to the missionary, "You see we never get rain, while those tribes who never pray as we do [i.e., Christian fashion] obtain abundance." "This," the missionary confesses, "was a fact; and we often saw it raining on the hills ten miles off, while it would not look at us 'even with one eye.'" When the rain-doctor set to work, on the score that "the whole country needs the rain I am making," there ensues the argument:—

Quite so. How could the missionary hope to convince the rain-needy? Delusion for delusion, which was the more "religious"? And which was the plainer "fallacy" of the two fashions of prayer? The true solution of the problem is that set forth in the essay

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[paragraph continues]Sur le totemisme of M. Durkheim, 1 who may be supposed to speak for scientific sociology if any one does. In that essay he deals incidentally with the view of Dr. Frazer that the Australian Aruntas 2 are at the stage of pure magic, not having yet reached religion. Dr. Jevons, on the contrary, would regard them as truly religious in respect of their totem sacrament. M. Durkheim, applying the inductive method, notes indeed 3 that the life of the Aruntas is "stamped with religiosity, and that this religiosity is in origin essentially totemic"; but he adds: "The territory is covered with sacred trees, and groves, and mysterious grottos, where are piously preserved the objects of the cult. None of those sacred places is approached without a religious terror." And he concludes: "What is essential is that the rites of the Aruntas are at all points comparable to those which are found in systems incontestably religious: then they proceed from the same ideas and the same sentiments; and it is arbitrary to refuse them the same title."

The final condemnation of Dr. Frazer's definition, however, is, as we shall see cause later to say of that of Dr. Jevons, that in strictness it ignores the bulk of the religious life of mankind. He himself avows that only a part of mankind has ever abandoned magic and taken to "religion instead." In his own words, magic is a "universal faith," a "truly Catholic creed"; 4and he might, without extending his ample anthropological learning, further establish this fact by reference to current religion. If religion is to mean only the ideas of "the more thoughtful part of mankind," we shall simply be committed to a new inquiry as to who are the more thoughtful; and the agnostic will have something to say on that head.

Are they the believers in the efficacy of prayer? Insofar as such believers profess belief in an Omnipotent and Unchanging Providence, they stultify their theistic creed as vitally as ever did the magician. Prayer presupposes the changeableness of a Divine will declared to be unchangeable. Then prayer, like magic, is fundamentally opposed to belief in an omnipotent deity! Where shall we stop? Dr. Frazer 5 supposes the reader to ask, "How was it that intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic?"; and he thoughtfully and rightly answers that before the age of science it was really not easy to detect. But he could hardly say as much of prayer, whereof the "fallacy" was detected among

p. 20

[paragraph continues]Hebrews and heathens thousands of years ago. Yet by his definition the contemporary believer in prayer is religious and the ancient worshipper of Isis was not. On such principles there can be no science of religion whatever, any more than there is a science of orthodoxy. In order to classify the very phenomena with which Dr. Frazer mainly occupies himself, we should have to create a new set of terms for nine-tenths of them, recognising "religion" only as a certain procedure that chronically obtruded itself among them. And then would come Dr. Jevons to explain that this religion was not a religion at all, inasmuch as it resulted from a process of reasoning!

Science, then, is driven to reject both apriorisms alike, and to proceed to find a definition by way of a loyal induction.

Footnotes

11:3 Golden Bough, 2nd ed., pref., p. xvi, and i, 63, note.

11:4 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i, 63.

12:1 A similar criticism, I find, is passed by Mr. Lang (Magic and Religion, 1901, pp. 48. 49, etc.), who seeks to turn Dr. Frazer's oversight to the account of his own theory of an occult primeval but non-primitive monotheism. It is doubly unfortunate that Dr. Frazer's error should thus be made to seem part of the rationalist case against traditionalism.

12:2 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i, 71.

12:3 The Making of Religion: cp. Magic and Religion, passim.

13:1 Work cited, pp, 1, 3.

13:2 Pref., p. xvii; cp. i, 70.

13:3 i. 64-65.

13:4 See his previous instances, pp. 19, 33, 45.

13:5 Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, pp. 59, 477. Ref. also to pp. 311, 369, 476, 522.

13:6 Maspero, Études de mythologie et d’archéologie égyptienne, i, 106. Cp. Dr. Frazer's farther citations from Erman and Wiedemann, to the same effect; and see Budge, Intr. to trans. of Book of the Dead, p cxlvii.; Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, p. 2; and Hillebrandt, Ritual-literatur, 1897, p. 167 sq., there cited.

14:1 Rev. R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui: or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, pp. 180-1. Cp. p. 102 as to prayers and medicine.

14:2 For that thesis there is some support in the testimonies which limit the "religion" of some primitive tribes to a few forms of magic. According to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen there is hardly anything else in the mental apparatus of many tribes of Australian aborigines. Cp. A. E. Pratt, Two Years Among New Guinea Cannibals, 1906, pp. 314-7; Knud Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North, 1908, pp. 123-5. Mr. Pratt pronounces that "the most elementary ideas of religion do not seem to exist" among the Papuans, who practise a little magic; and Mr. Rasmussen says the Eskimos worship no deity, but merely dread a collective evil power, which they propitiate by observance of customs. Cp. further L. Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, pp. 153, 343-6.

14:3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 237. Cp. Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, pp. 253-4; O. Weber, Die Literatur der Babylonier and Assyrier, 1907, p. 151.

14:4 Dr. Frazer further writes (p. 61) that in both "the elements of caprice, of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature." This is a further and a gratuitous logical confusion. Magic certainly recognises "caprice" in its "nature"; and science certainly notes "chance" and "accident," which are not negations of, but aspects of, the uniformity of nature. Where could science place them, save in nature, if she recognises them; and if she does not recognise them, how can she name or banish them? As to the scientific force of the terms, cp. the author's Letters on Reasoning, vii.

15:1 Essay on the History of Astronomy, sect. iii.

15:2 Philosophie Positive, 4é ed. iv, 491.

15:3 J. C. Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, ed. 1867, p. 149.

15:4 Prof. Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. trans. 1907, pp. 91, 255.

15:5 Herodotus i, 91; Homer, Iliad, xiv, 434-442. Philemon ap Stobaei Serm. lxii. 8; Aeschylus, Prom. Vinct. 908-927; Diogenes Laërt. vii, 74 (149); ix, 6 (7); Clemens Alexand. Stromata, v, 14; Plutarch, De Exilio, xi; De Defectu Orac. xxviii-xxix; De Stoic. Repugnant. xxxiv; De Placitis Philos. i, § 7, 17; ii, 25-28; Aulus Gellius, vi, 1, 2; Seneca, De Providentia, v, 5-7; Cicero, De Diviniatione, ii, 10. A history of the discussion  seems wanting. Cp. H. N. Coleridge, Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets, Pt. i, 2nd ed. 1834, pp. 184-187: and Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, Eng. trans. i, 194-196. V. Fabricius, in his essay De Jove et Fato in p. Vergili Aeneide (1896, p. 21), sums up: "Nullo Vergili carminis loco Jovem fato subiectum esse plane ac clare dici nobis confitendum est. Sunt quidem nonnulla quibus Jovis potentia et fati vis simul dominari videntur." This coincides with the summary of H. N. Coleridge as to Homer.

16:1 Jamblichus, De Mysteriis, Ep. Porph. and vi, 5-7. It is noteworthy that according to Abammon the Chaldeans never use threats in their magic, but the Egyptians sometimes do.

16:2 Ex. xxix, 19-21.

16:3 Ex. xvii, 9-13.

16:4 Zendavesta, Mihir Yasht, xxxi.

16:5 Lev. xvi.

16:6 Josh. vi.

16:7 1 Kings xvii, 21.

16:8 Jevons, Introd. pp. 25, 35.

16:9 G. B. i, 62.

17:1 G. B. i. 75.

17:2 See for further instances in Babylonian practice, Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 316- Compare Dr. Frazer's Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 46, 94, for instances of late combinations of "magic" with "religion"; and p. 97 for an instance among contemporary primitives.

17:3 Cp Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. iv, 294-5, where it is noted that the islanders try different priests and sorcerers as more civilised people try different doctors. "The sorcerers were a distinct class among the priests of the island; and their art appears to claim equal antiquity with the other parts of that cruel system of idolatry," etc. (Cp. i, iii, 36-37.) The difference is simply socio-political: the sorcerer is an independent performer who does not run a God or a temple.

17:4 G. B. i, 64. Contrast Erman, Handbk. of Eg. Rel., p. 148.

17:5 Cp. Dr. Frazer's own citations as to the Brahmans, G. B. i, 145-6.

17:6 "And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh," Exodus vii, 1. Cp. xvii, 11; xvii, 15, etc. Steinthal's theory (Essay on Prometheus, Eng. tr. by R. Martineau in vol. with Goldziher, p. 392), that from the Yahwist point of view Moses must ultimately die for playing the heathen God in bringing water from the rock, will hardly consist with such passages.

18:1 Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, ed. 1861, pp. 17, 18 (ed. 1905, p. 15).

19:1 L’Année Sociologique, 5e année, 1902.

19:2 Described by Messrs. Spencer rand Gillen (in their Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899).

19:3 P. 87.

19:4 Id. i, 74.

19:5 Id. i, 78.