SUN WOKSHIP 



By Herbert J. Spinden 

 The Brooklyn Museum 



[With 6 plates] 



The first men, the first really intelligent men, advanced toward 

 knowledge of the world they lived in by remembering their experiences, 

 especially such experiences as normally were repeated in nature. 

 These recurrent events became the facts of life, and for these facts 

 they found words. And among the greatest facts of life were the 

 alternation of day and night, of summer and winter, which inevitably 

 men learned to link with a certain bright thing coming and going in 

 the sky in an orderly and predictable way. 



But I do not think that sun worship was the first religious impulse 

 of man newly awakened to intelligence and with a growing means of 

 communicating deeds, inferences, and emotions in articulated speech. 

 I think that much which we call religion and much which we call art 

 sprang from an assumption that reality is at once spiritual and phj^si- 

 cal — that everything in the world parallels an apparent duality of 

 mind and body in man himself. Now human beings are gregarious 

 animals with a social life fed by interacting personalities. Leader- 

 ship and followership are responses to a psychology which makes this 

 human herd assume a functional status as a superorganism. When 

 an old trusted leader lies inert, there always has been the question 

 whether the spiritual double of his quiet body might not continue to 

 exist and retain power. And since men cannot be sure, they bury the 

 corpse and placate the ghost. At any rate purposeful burial is the 

 first archeological evidence of religious emotion. Also there are to- 

 day numerous human societies who believe that the universe is ani- 

 mate and that ghosts of the dead inhabit animals and plants, stones, 

 clouds, and streams, even stars and the greater luminaries of heaven. 



Religion arose, it seems to me, in the effort to use the souls of the 

 dead for the benefit of the living. Art arose, it seems to me, as a 

 vehicle of magic, of flattery and coercion over immaterial forces. To 

 be sure, both spread far beyond these first intentions. But while pur- 



=^The eighth Arthur Lecture, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, Feb- 

 ruary 21, 1939. 



447 



