"The War of the Ghosts and Gods"

The War of the Ghosts and Gods
The Speaker, February 9, 1901



The Making Of Religion. By Andrew Lang, M.A., LL.D. London: Longmans Green

Supreme among the lost arts of mankind, larger and more completely lost than those connected with pottery or stained glass, is the lost art of mythology. Races in early times invented cosmic systems with the fancy and independence of a set of architects submitting to the Deity the plans of a prospective universe. One thought the world could be best arranged in the form of a huge tree; another that it could be placed on an elephant and the elephant on a tortoise. Great as is our gain from science, we have lost something in losing this gigantesque scope of the human fancy; there must have been no little education in audacity and magnanimity in thus juggling with the stars. We have lost something in being tied to the solar system like a treadmill. It is especially hard upon those, like ourselves, whose peculiar talents, entirely useless in a civilised age, would have been, we are convinced, a great success in a time of impenetrable ignorance. In early childhood we manufactured many excellent mythologies. The best, from a savage point of view, was one in which the whole world was a giant with the sun for one eye and the moon for the other, which he opened alternately in an everlasting wink. This prose idyll would have made us head medicine man in a happier age. But we fear that the Royal Society, even if informed of the hypothesis, would remain cold.

There is, we fancy, too much tendency among able students of mythology to overlook the vagueness and aesthetic impalpability of these savage ideas, and this fault is almost the only fault we can find with Mr. Andrew Lang's admirable book which now lies before us. Mr. Andrew Lang and any one of his opponents- such, for example, as Mr. Grant Allen- in the endless retorts and repetitions of controversy, tend more and more to speak in a hard, fixed way of what savages really believe; whereas the truth is, we imagine, that they do not believe anything in the sense that Mr. Grant Allen believed in Evolution or Mr. Andrew Lang in Homeric Unity. It is not so much that an old Scandinavian peasant believed in the tree Ygdrasil as that he never doubted it. He had never brought the thing into that clear intellectual presentment in which doubt or denial are conceived or required. This, as we say, is the only point in which we think Mr. Lang's argument demands a continuous check or allowance. The great part of Mr. Lang's book is devoted to an attack, and, as it seems to us, a rather successful attack, on the latest theory of savage deities, that they are all derived from the worship of ancestors, from ghosts rather than from gods. Mr. Lang maintains that this leaves wholly unexplained a vast mass of barbaric beliefs, which point to the idea of a general creator, a being who made the world. Against Mr. Allen's and Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory, Mr. Andrew Lang sets a number of facts, which are certainly very striking, in favour of the theory that ancestor-worship was a half-civilized development, a kind of fashionable craze, which more or less obliterated a more primitive and obvious worship of creative deities whose existence explained the existence of things. To take one example at random, from Mr. Lang's stores, there is a tribe of polytheistic savages one of whose gods, "an old serpent," is described as having made everything, and as being, apparently, exceedingly sulky because he is not paid a proper degreee of attention. It is very hard, he thinks, when he put himself to the trouble of making the sun and stars, that the people desert their old friend for a race of new and dandified deities. This certainly looks like the traces of a monotheism choked by a polytheism. Another more familiar instance is the case of the Jews. If Jehovah was originally an ancestral deity, why were the Jews, who were more obsessed than any other nation with the idea of their deity, more indifferent than any other nation to the fate of the dead? If, as Professor Huxley maintained, the Jews borrowed their religious idealism from Egypt, why were they entirely without the one dominant and picturesque Egyptian conception, the conception of the judgments of another world?

But we ourselves, as we have said, conceive that the question is somewhat too genuinely savage to be settled by black and white civilised definitions. To express something deeper and older than language itself in mere language is a thing to be attempted humbly and tentatively; it is, on the whole, rather like trying to convey the text of "Hamlet" by a code of naval signals. As far as we can see, the chances are that a savage's religion existed long before the oldest ancestor-worship or the simplest teleology. Long before he said that the thing which plagued him and blessed him and drove him before it was either his great grandfather or the First Cause, he probably said it was "Bonk" or "Chunk," a "circumstance over which he had no control." Probably he began by feeling the eternal fact that it rained whether he liked it or not; then this benignant insolence in the rain extended to the whole creation, and then, for all we know, it may have been attributed to the spirit of some one dead. But at the beginning the savage stood face to face with the fact that the very mercies which sustained his own being came by a kind of scornful miracle quite unexplained to him; he stood at the beginning face to face with the fact that he could not make a tree grow, and that, when all is said and done, is pretty much where we stand at the end.

This, for example, is very much what we think of the problem, discussed at some length by Mr. Lang, about the origin of Jehovah, the highest of all historic deities. We think it improbable that Moses thought Jehovah was a philosophical First Cause and still more improbable that he thought Jehovah was his great-uncle. But suppose that Moses said (or rather felt), not "Jehovah is the ultimate cause of all things " or "Jehovah is my family god," but simply "Jehovah is with me: there was one who drove down the great lions so that I could slay them and who smote me with the evil pain when I ate the unlawful berries." At the beginning and at the end of all life, learned and ignorant, there is the abiding truth, that in the inmost theatre of the soul of man, with a scenery of bottomless infinities and appalling abstractions, there is always going forward one ancient mystery-play, in which there are only two characters.

There is one aspect of the thesis of gods against ghosts which we should be inclined to suggest to Mr. Andrew Lang rather as a query than a divergence of opinion. Both Mr. Lang and his opponents seem to assume that the terminology of ancestor-worship must indicate a lower spiritual condition than the terminology of theistic creation. The case of Mr. Andrew Lang is, we imagine, that men in pursuing a race of mere tribal heroes forgot the humble Deity who, in creating all things, had become the servant of all. The case of Mr. Spencer and the rest of Mr. Lang's opponents is, we imagine, that the title of "Creator of all Things" was ultimately bestowed on some ancestral hero somewhat as the title of "Brother of the Sun and Moon" might be bestowed on the Emperor of Japan. In both cases terms of paternity and procreation are assumed to represent a tribal superstition. But surely it is not impossible that the title of "father" or "procreator" might be a higher title for a cosmic creator, instead of "creator" being a higher title for a father. This is at least supported by the case of the noblest of religious reformers. Jesus of Nazareth found a conception of an universal creator and deliberately bestowed on him the title of an ancestor- he called him "Our Father," which any old Campbell would have called Diarmid or any old Jew called Abraham. This was surely not a degradation: it was one of the three or four dazzling strokes of religious genius which made Jesus what he was. By thus raising before all men the vast and generous conception, not of a Creator, but of a Begetter of all things, he touched with one hand the oldest and with the other the newest philosophy. He embraced ancestor-worship by propounding a Deity with a touch of kinship. He reached out to evolution by announcing a creation by natural causes. Surely, even in dealing with the unquestionable superiority of the idea of a Creator to the idea of a mere ancestor, one ought not to forget that at one stage of religious evolution the two positions are reversed; and the name taken from any common father of four babies becomes the loftiest of all the crowns of God.

There is only one other fault of Mr. Lang's work, besides this common tendency to take too scientifically the floating fancies of the barbarian. This latter indeed is equally typical of his opponents: Mr. Herbert Spencer, in particular, is an admirable writer, but it must be candidly said of him that he is a very poor savage. He has not in him the eternal savage who is in every poet: and this is what throws him out when he comes to deal with elementary and poetic things. But the other fault in Mr. Lang's book is that it is really two books. He joins on to the first thesis that aboriginal religion came from creative and not ancestral gods, the totally distinct thesis, also very interesting in itself, that the savage legends of shades and spirits might be much better understood if we took them in conjunction with recent psychical research. We should not complain if Mr. Andrew Lang wrote two books: indeed we should rejoice if he wrote twenty. But we cannot see sufficient organic connection between the thesis that ghosts might be explained by modern philosophy and the thesis that original savage philosophy had nothing to do with ghosts at all. We must admit, however, that we think Mr. Andrew Lang's protest against the tone of many scientists towards psychical inquiry very reasonable. Spiritualism in itself may be a very poor religion: no really religious person would think a dead stockbroker any more convincing than a live one. But no sort of reason can be rationally alleged against spiritualism as a form of psychological inquiry. Sufficiently large discoveries have been made in the field of mentality to justify any one who likes a dull science in considering it an entirely genuine one. Huxley was surely amazingly illogical when he declined to hear messages from the dead on the ground of their general futility, saying that he would take no trouble "to hear the conversation of curates and old women in the nearest cathedral town." The answer is almost staringly obvious. However low may be the mental level of a cathedral town, it can hardly be lower than that of the animal world, which Huxley spent his life in studying: even a curate is probably wittier than a jelly-fish; and an old woman would probably be more fertile in information than an aged amoeba. The reason why Huxley studied these brainless creatures was because they were things to be studied, and, like a true man of science, he neither knew nor cared to what the inquiry would ultimately lead him. Why the same process should not be applied to psychical phenomena we cannot conceive. It is true that, for all we ourselves know (or care), no evidences of purely spectral influences have yet been found in this department. But no honest man can deny that the old, common-sense hypothesis has been as much upset by hypnotism and suggestion as it could be by a thousand spectres. If any rationalist of the dawn of the century had been asked to believe that a hypnotist, by thinking hard at another man, could produce a blister on his leg, he would have said immediately that he would as soon believe in the ghost of Banquo at once.

We do not feel any disrespect towards this book because it contains two distinct ideas. It is a sufficiently sensational event in the life of a reviewer to find a book which contains even one. But we think it an unfortunate thing that two purely scientific conceptions should be mixed together, and we think it an inexpressibly unfortunate thing that any purely scientific conception should be treated (as sometimes seems the case with Mr. Lang) as if its assertion or negation could possibly affect spirituality. We think spiritualistic inquiry legitimate and interesting, but there is nothing particularly spiritual about spiritualism. If a human soul on earth does not strike us as a thing of splendour, it will not be made more splendid by such a trifle as death. We think Mr. Andrew Lang's theory that monotheism preceded polytheism perfectly tenable; but it does not matter one rap to religion which came first. The idea of a forgotten omnipotence is certainly a thrilling one. But, surely, there would be as sublime a thrill for the man who, having long worshipped the tree as one god and the river as another, suddenly realised, with a shock fit for a detective story, that, under a hundred disguises, they were all the same person.