The Age of the Gods

II. Later Paleolithic Culture and the Religion of the Hunter

15 ii Later Palæolithic Culture and the Religion of the Hunter i. the place of religion in primitive culture The later palæolithic period which we have described in the last chapter has an extraordinary importance for the history of culture, not only because it witnesses the appearance of the modern type of humanity , but still more because for the first time it enables us to form some idea of the inner life of primitive culture. hitherto we have been dealing with the dry bones of vanished cultures. Now for the first time we are able to see something of the life behind. We can at last enter into the mind of primitive man and gain some knowledge of the psychic conditions which influenced the life of prehistoric man. Many attempts— some of them brilliant enough—have been made to reconstruct the whole course of man’s social and religious development from the very dawn of humanity, but these are from their very nature incapable of proof or disproof. It is impossible to reconstruct man’s early social organisation, and still more his psychic development, from flint hand axes and scrapers, or from the rare fossil remains, whose very physical interpretation is sometimes uncertain. even in palæolithic times, we have seen that racial composition of the population of europe was far from simple, and this renders impossible any attempt to explain culture on purely racial lines. The pure race is at best a scientific abstraction, and the generalisations, in which many anthropologists still indulge, regarding the fixed types of racial psychology , which lie at the root of all historic cultures, are mere specula- 16 The Age of the Gods tions, often influenced by modern national prejudices. from the first we have to deal, not with pure races, but with regional types which are the products of social and cultural influences. a culture can only be understood from within. It is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and a common attitude to life, far more than to any uniformity of physical type. hence the study of primitive culture is intimately bound up with that of primitive religion. Throughout the history of humanity the religious impulse has been always and everywhere present as one of the great permanent forces that make and alter man’s destiny, and the deeper we delve in the past, the more evident it is how inseparable is the religious instinct from human life and society. The beginnings of religion are as old as the human consciousness, and we can no more go behind the religious stage in human history than we can go behind the origins of language or of social life itself. This, however, presupposes a broader definition of religion than that which it has sometimes received. It would not hold good, if, with sir James frazer, we limit religion to the conciliation and worship of supernatural and personal beings which control the forces of nature. even Tyler’s “minimum” definition, “the belief in spiritual beings,” is too narrow, for primitive religion is something vaguer and more rudimentary even than the type of thought to which these definitions properly refer. Yet we can go back behind this stage and still find religion—a powerful and living religion—existing. Wherever and whenever man has a sense of dependence on external powers which are conceived as mysterious and higher than man’s own, there is religion, and the feelings of awe and self-abasement with which man is filled in the presence of such powers is essentially a religious emotion, the root of worship and prayer. Taken in this sense the religious instinct is part of the nature of man. It involves both affection and fear, and its power is strongest at times of individual or social crisis, when the routine of ordinary life is broken through and men are face to face with the unforeseen and the unknown. hence the moments of vital change in the life of the individual —birth, puberty, and death—are pre-eminently religious, and so, too, for a society that lives in close dependence on Nature, are the vital The Religion of the Hunter 17 moments of the life of the earth, spring and winter, seed-time and harvest , the yearly death and rebirth of nature. The earliest form of religious observance of which we possess any real evidence is, in fact, connected with...