Freud - Complete Works (455 page)

  
²
Cf. Tylor (1891,
1
, 425), Wundt
(1906, 173)..

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2719

   What led to the introduction of
these terms was a realization of the highly remarkable view of
nature and the universe adopted by the primitive races of whom we
have knowledge, whether in past history or at the present time.
They people the world with innumerable spiritual beings both
benevolent and malignant; and these spirits and demons they regard
as the causes of natural phenomena and they believe that not only
animals and plants but all the inanimate objects in the world are
animated by them. A third, and perhaps the most important, article
of this primitive ‘philosophy of nature’ strikes us as
less strange, since, while we have retained only a very limited
belief in the existence of spirits and explain natural phenomena by
the agency of impersonal physical forces, we ourselves are not very
far removed from this third belief. For primitive peoples believe
that human individuals are inhabited by similar spirits. These
souls which live in human beings can leave their habitations and
migrate into other human beings; they are the vehicle of mental
activities and are to a certain extent independent of their bodies.
Originally souls were pictured as very similar to persons and only
in the course of a long development have they lost their material
characteristics and become to a high degree
‘spiritualized’.¹

   Most authorities incline to the
view that these ideas of a soul are the original nucleus of the
animistic system, that spirits are only souls that have made
themselves independent, and that the souls of animals, plants and
objects were constructed on the analogy of human souls.

   How did primitive men arrive at
the peculiar dualistic views on which the animistic system is
based? It is supposed that they did so by observing the phenomena
of sleep (including dreams) and of death which so much resembles
it, and by attempting to explain those states, which are of such
close concern to every one. The chief starting-point of this
theorizing must have been the problem of death. What primitive man
regarded as the natural thing was the indefinite prolongation of
life - immortality. The idea of death was only accepted late, and
with hesitancy. Even for us it is lacking in content and has no
clear connotation. There have been very lively but inconclusive
discussions upon the part that may have been played in the
formation of the basic doctrines of animism by such other observed
or experienced facts as dream-pictures, shadows, mirror images, and
so on.²

  
¹
Wundt (1906), Chapter IV, ‘Die
Seelenvorstellungen’.

  
²
Cf. Wundt, Herbert Spencer, as well as the
general articles in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1910-11)
on ‘Animism’, ‘Mythology’, etc.

Totem And Taboo

2720

   It has been regarded as perfectly
natural and not in the least puzzling that primitive man should
have reacted to the phenomena which aroused his speculations by
forming the idea of the soul and then of extending it to objects in
the external world. In discussing the fact that the same animistic
ideas have emerged among the most various races and at every
period, Wundt (1906, 154) declares that ‘they are the
necessary psychological product of a mythopoeic
consciousness . . . and in this sense, therefore,
primitive animism must be regarded as the spiritual expression of
the natural state of man, so far as it is accessible to our
observation’. The justification for attributing life to
inanimate objects was already stated by Hume in his
Natural
History of Religion
: ‘There is an universal tendency
among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to
transfer to every object those qualities with which they are
familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately
conscious.’¹

   Animism is a system of thought.
It does not merely give an explanation of a particular phenomenon,
but allows us to grasp the whole universe as a single unity from a
single point of view. The human race, if we are to follow the
authorities, have in the course of ages developed three such
systems of thought - three great pictures of the universe:
animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific. Of these,
animism, the first to be created, is perhaps the one which is most
consistent and exhaustive and which gives a truly complete
explanation of the nature of the universe. This first human
Weltanschauung
is a
psychological
theory. It would go
beyond our present purpose to show how much of it still persists in
modern life, either in the debased form of superstition or as the
living basis of our speech, our beliefs and our philosophies.

   With these three stages in mind,
it may be said that animism itself is not yet a religion but
contains the foundations on which religions are later built. It is
obvious, too, that myths are based on animistic premises, though
the details of the relation between myths and animism seem to be
unexplained in some essential respects.

  
¹
Quoted by Tylor (1891,
1
,
477).

Totem And Taboo

2721

(2)

   Our psycho-analytic approach to
the subject, however, is from another side. It is not to be
supposed that men were inspired to create their first system of the
universe by pure speculative curiosity. The practical need for
controlling the world around them must have played its part. So we
are not surprised to learn that, hand in hand with the animistic
system, there went a body of instructions upon how to obtain
mastery over men, beasts and things - or rather, over their
spirits. These instructions go by the names of ‘sorcery
[
Zauberei
]’ and ‘magic [
Magie
]’.
Reinach (1905-12,
2
, xv) describes them as the
‘strategy of animism’; I should prefer, following
Hubert and Mauss (1904), to regard them as its technique.

   Can the concepts of sorcery and
magic be distinguished? Perhaps - if we are prepared to show a
somewhat arbitrary disregard for the fluctuations of linguistic
usage. Sorcery, then, is essentially the art of influencing spirits
by treating them in the same way as one would treat men in like
circumstances: appeasing them, making amends to them, propitiating
them, intimidating them, robbing them of their power, subduing them
to one’s will - by the same methods that have proved
effective with living men. Magic, on the other hand, is something
different: fundamentally, it disregards spirits and makes use of
special procedures and not of everyday psychological methods. It is
easy to guess that magic is the earlier and more important branch
of animistic technique; for magical methods can, among others, be
used in dealing with spirits,¹ and magic can be applied as
well in cases where, as it seems to us, the process of
spiritualizing Nature has not yet been carried out.

   Magic has to serve the most
varied purposes - it must subject natural phenomena to the will of
man, it must protect the individual from his enemies and from
dangers and it must give him power to injure his enemies. But the
principle on the presumption of which magical action is based - or,
more properly, the principle of magic - is so striking that none of
the authorities has failed to recognize it. Tylor, if we leave on
one side an accompanying moral judgement, states it in its most
succinct form as mistaking an ideal connection for a real one. I
will illustrate this feature from two groups of magical acts.

  
¹
If a spirit is scared away by making a
noise and shouting, the action is one purely of sorcery; if
compulsion is applied to it by getting hold of its name, magic has
been used against it.

Totem And Taboo

2722

   One of the most widespread
magical procedures for injuring an enemy is by making an effigy of
him from any convenient material. Whether the effigy resembles him
is of little account: any object can be ‘made into’ an
effigy of him. Whatever is then done to the effigy, the same thing
happens to the detested original; whatever part of the
former’s body is damaged, the same part of the latter’s
becomes diseased. The same magical technique may be employed, not
only for purposes of private enmity, but also for pious ends and
for giving help to gods against malignant demons. I will quote from
Frazer (1911
a
,
1
, 67): ‘Every night when the
sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was
assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend
Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the
powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky
to obscure his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in
this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple
at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile
with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax,
and on it the demon’s name was written in green ink. Wrapt in
a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn
in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat
upon, hacked with a stone knife, and cast on the ground. There the
priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then
burnt it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi
himself had thus been effectually disposed of, waxen effigies of
each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers and
children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service,
accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was
repeated not merely morning, noon and night, but whenever a storm
was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing
across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disc. The fiends of
darkness, clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their
images as if they had been done to themselves; they passed away, at
least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant
once more.¹

  
¹
It seems probable that the biblical
prohibition against making an image of any living thing originated,
not from any objection to the plastic arts, but from a desire to
deprive magic (which was abominated by the Hebrew religion) of one
of its tools. Cf. Frazer (1911
a
,
1
, 87
n
.).

Totem And Taboo

2723

   From the vast number of magical
acts having a similar basis I will only draw attention to two more,
which have played a large part among primitive peoples of every age
and which persist to some degree in the myths and cults of higher
stages of civilization - that is, rituals for producing rain and
fertility. Rain is produced magically by imitating it or the clouds
and storms which give rise to it, by ‘playing at rain’,
one might almost say. In Japan, for instance, ‘a party of
Ainos will scatter water by means of sieves, while others will take
a porringer, fit it up with sails and oars as if it were a boat,
and then push or draw it about the village and gardens’. In
the same way, the fertility of the earth is magically promoted by a
dramatic representation of human intercourse. Thus, to take one
from a countless number of instances, ‘in some parts of Java,
at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the
husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there
engage in sexual intercourse’ to encourage the fertility of
the rice by their example.¹ There is a dread, however, that
prohibited, incestuous sexual relations may cause a failure of the
crops and make the earth sterile.²

   Certain negative observances,
that is, magical precautions, must be included in this first group.
‘When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the
jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with
their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did
so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the
prey would slip through their hands.’³ Or again,
‘while a Gilyak hunter is pursuing game in the forest, his
children at home are forbidden to make drawings on wood or on sand;
for they fear that if the children did so, the paths in the forest
would become as perplexed as the lines in the drawings, so that the
hunter might lose his way and never return.’
⁴

  
¹
Frazer (1911
a
,
2
,
98).

  
²
An echo of this is to be found in the
Oedipus Rex
of Sophocles.

  
³
Frazer (1911
a
,
1
,
120).

  
⁴
Frazer (1911
a
,
1
,
122).

Totem And Taboo

2724

   In these last, as in so many
other instances of the workings of magic, the element of distance
is disregarded; in other words, telepathy is taken for granted. We
shall find no difficulty, therefore, in understanding this
characteristic of magic.

   There can be no doubt what is to
be regarded as the operative factor in all these examples. It is
the
similarity
between the act performed and the result
expected. For this reason Frazer describes this sort of magic as
‘imitative’ or ‘homoeopathic’. If I wish it
to rain, I have only to do something that looks like rain or is
reminiscent of rain. At a later stage of civilization, instead of
this rain-magic, processions will be made to a temple and prayers
for rain will be addressed to the deity living in it. Finally, this
religious technique will in its turn be given up and attempts will
be made to produce effects in the atmosphere which will lead to
rain.