Animism - The Seed Of Religion E-Book

Edward Clodd

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 92

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A brilliant work about animism and its connection to various fields of religion. This ebook is not a cheap scanned version of the original but has been completely revised, including an interactive table-of-contents. CONTENTS: 1. Pre-Human Elements In Religion 2. Brain In Animal And Man 3. Man In The Making 4. Animal And Human Psychology 5. Naturalism; Or Conception Of Power Everywhere 6. Animism; Or Conception Of Spirit Everywhere 7. Theories Of The Nature Of Spirit 8. Spirits In Inanimate Things 9. Fear - A Constant Element In Animism 10. Absence Of Sequence In The Objects Of Worship 11. Absentee Gods 12. Maleficent Spritis 13. Evolution Of Idea Of Benevolent Gods - Earth Mother 14. Tree And Animal Worship 15. Stone Worship 16. Water Worship 17 Deification And Worship Of Ancestors

Leseprobe

Animism - The Seed Of Religion

Edward Clodd

Contents:

1. Pre-Human Elements In Religion

2. Brain In Animal And Man

3. Man In The Making

4. Animal And Human Psychology

5. Naturalism; Or Conception Of Power Everywhere

6. Animism; Or Conception Of Spirit Everywhere

7. Theories Of The Nature Of Spirit

8. Spirits In Inanimate Things

9. Fear – A Constant Element In Animism

10. Absence Of Sequence In The Objects Of Worship

11. Absentee Gods

12. Maleficent Spritis

13. Evolution Of Idea Of Benevolent Gods – Earth Mother

14. Tree And Animal Worship

15. Stone Worship

16. Water Worship

17 Deification And Worship Of Ancestors

Animism - The Seed Of Religion , E. Clodd

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Germany

ISBN: 9783849623678

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

Cover Design: @ infanta – fotolia.com

1. Pre-Human Elements In Religion

In an article on " Democracy and Reaction," in the Nineteenth Century of April, 1905, Mr. John Morley remarks that "if we want a  platitude, there is nothing like a definition. Perhaps most definitions hang between platitude and paradox. There are said to be ten thousand definitions of Religion." One of these is supplied by Parson Thwackum in Tom Jones. " When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion, and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion, and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England." That easy-going cleric expressed what is in the minds of the majority of people when the word " religion " is used. He lived before the birth of the science of comparative theology; those who have applied its methods and profited by its results can pass in larger sympathy from specific creeds to partake of the universal spirit which every creed strives to embody.

To have done this is to have grasped the distinction between Religion and Theology, between what is fundamental and what is accidental, between that which is one in essence and abiding, and that which is manifold and fleeting. For religion was before all theologies, which are but concrete and partial aspects of it. It is before them all, being born of the emotions; and unaffected by them all, being independent of readjustments of creeds and dogmas. In that storehouse of fact and suggestion, Primitive Culture, Dr. Tylor remarks that " no religion lies in utter isolation from the rest, and the thoughts and principles of modem Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilization, perhaps even of human existence." One object of the present brief treatise is to pursue those clues still farther back, even beyond the human to the pre-human in the life-history of our globe. For nearly every book on the Origin of Religion assumes a non-religious stage as preceding a religious stage in man's development, while many of them assume what are now known to be secondary stages as sole and primary. All in vain, so far as approach to solution of the problem goes, because the writers have not travelled beyond the historic period, and have looked for consistency of ideas where only confusion was possible. " I believe," says Mr. Hopkins in his Religions of India, " that all interpretations of religion which start from the assumption that fetishism, animal-worship, nature-worship, or ancestor-worship was a primitive form from which all other forms were derived, are destined to be overthrown. The earliest beliefs were a jumble of ideas, and it was long before the elements of the different kinds of religions were discriminated."

2. BrainIn Animal And Man

The inquiry will take us along the lines of continuous organic development, bringing into view the unbroken connection between animal and human psychology The descent of man and his fellow-mammals, as of all living things below these, from a common ancestry, is demonstrated to the satisfaction of every competent authority. But in many minds there lingers the old Adam of bias which would limit that descent to man's bodily structure, and which refuses to admit that the mental differences between him and other animals are differences only of degree, and not of kind. This reluctance will vanish only when preconceived notions of the soul or spirit as a special human endowment are dispelled. And this will follow when knowledge of the fundamentally identical nature of the apparatus of the mind in man and brute is acquired. Let us summarize the facts about that apparatus, with which alone we are here concerned. For we know nothing of mind apart from matter, or of matter apart from mind; and how the passage is effected from the nerve-cells to consciousness in animals and in man remains a mystery. But we know that advance in intelligence proceeds pari passu with increasing complexity of brain-structure. This is traceable along the whole series of animals. In the Invertebrates the brain is a mass of nerve ganglia near the head end of the body (" the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man " ); in the lowest Vertebrate, the fish, it is very small compared with the spinal cord; in reptiles its mass increases, and in birds it is still more marked. In all the lower and smaller forms the surface of the brain is either smooth or evenly rounded, or exhibits a few grooves known as " sulci," which separate the ridges or convolutions of the substance of the brain. " But in the larger mammals these grooves become extremely numerous, and the intermediate convolutions proportionately more complicated, until in the elephant, the porpoise, the higher apes, and man, the cerebral surface appears a perfect labyrinth of tortuous foldings. . . . The surface of the brain of a monkey exhibits a sort of skeleton map of man's, and in the man-like apes the details become more and more filled in until it is only in minor characters that the chimpanzee's or the orang's brain can be structurally distinguished from man's."  It follows from this that if any part of the mental apparatus is injured or thrown out of gear, the result is the same in each case — functional upset or suspense. The dog and the horse behave as we behave, nor can this be otherwise, because their sense-organs report, of course with vast differences in result, to their central nervous systems, the messages which are transmitted by the vibrations of the ethereal medium and the air, and, within the limits of their consciousness, they are affected as we are affected, and their actions ruled accordingly. " If there is no ground for believing that a dog thinks, neither is there any for believing that he feels."

Therefore the doctrine of Evolution has no " favoured-nation clause " for man. It admits no break in the psychical chain which links him to the lowest life forms, be these plant or animal. It finds no arrest of continuity between the bark of the dog and the orations of Demosthenes, or between the pulsations of an amoeba and the ecstasies of a saint. " Great is the mystery of heredity "; of the origin and transmission, through numberless generations, of tendencies traceable to remote pre-human ancestors, tendencies which, potent against fundamental changes, are a key to constant elements in human nature. Before such mystery, one among many, the stories of miracles wrought by gods and holy men, of which sacred books and traditions tell, are but travesties of hidden wonders. The verdict of modem psychology is that " the mind of the animal exhibits substantially the same phenomena which the human mind exhibits in its early stages in the child. This means that the animal has as good a right to recognition as a mind-bearing creature, so to speak, as the child; and if we exclude him we should also exclude the child. Further, this also means that the development of the mind in its early stages, and in certain of its directions of progress, is revealed most adequately in the animals." Therefore, to study man apart is to misconceive him; it is to refuse to apply the only key to interpretation of the story of his intellectual and spiritual history. There should be, nowadays, little need to labour this point. The artificial lines drawn between instinct in the animal and reason, as the prerogative of man, have vanished. As Darwin puts it in the Descent of Man: " It is a significant fact that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason, and the less to unlearned instincts."  And the various stages of the reasoning faculty pass into one another by imperceptible gradations. It is only within recent years that we have realized how complex are our mental faculties; what a vast number of sense-conveyed impressions pass unnoted by us to storage in our brains; impressions which explain abnormal workings attributed by spiritualists to external, even supernatural, agencies. We have yet to learn that mind is far wider than consciousness.