jVA ture 



[August 15, 1907 



protest of the Western peoples of Europe against the 

 dominance of an Asiatic religion. 



Irrational is this prejudice in the first degree of course, 

 because not only have we the clearest historical evidence 

 that in our own religious practice, as in that of other races, 

 details of earlier ritual and observance have survived, 

 often by conscious and intentional adoption, but also, as 

 Robertson Smith well said, " experience shows that primi- 

 tive religious beliefs are practically indestructible, excepi 

 bv the destruction of the race in which they are ingrained." 

 All apostles of new creeds have had to preach to and gain 

 the adherence of societies which they could not hope to 

 lead to a perfect way all at once or even in centuries of 

 time, and all have had to take account of the pre-existing 

 habits of religious thought and actual expressions of re- 

 ligious feeling, and by accepting some compromise to 

 modifv these to their purpose. And if this be obviously 

 true of those societies which such an apostle as Mohammed 

 could influence directly and retain under some sort of per- 

 sonal control, what must we say of the societies to which 

 the truth only came at second . hand or by many more 

 degrees removed from the original prophetic utterance ^ 

 What of the remote or scattered folk to whom it came not 

 at all tiUafter a long interval, and then faint and confused 

 as a reverberating echo? For these at least there was no 

 possibility of such utter change as revelation working 

 through the human agency of a magnetic personality may 

 have effected elsewhere : and of their belief and their practice 

 much, perhaps the most, has remained primaeval and local, 

 and as the physical conditions of their life have prompted 

 it from all time to be, and prompt still. 



All this stratification in religious belief and practice it 

 is the function of .'\nthropology to investigate; and thereby 

 it may render no small service to religion itself by dis- 

 tinguishing accidental elements in ritual ana observance 

 which have persisted from systems worn out and aban- 

 doned. But while proclaiming that this investigation is 

 not only legitimate but necessary, I wish to-day to utter 

 a note of warning against a certain confusion of thought 

 which is often . manifested by the investigators in this 

 particular field, and is apt to occasion unfortunate ethical 

 consequences or, at the best, unnecessary scandal. It finds 

 expression in (he grouping of all the elements in belief, 

 observance, and ritual, which have persisted from earlier 

 systems to later, under one head as religious survivals, 

 without due account being taken of very vital differences, 

 both in their essential nature and in the history and reason 

 for their persistence. The word " survival " itself is ^cr 

 accidens not a very fortunate one. Though in the broad 

 sense perfectly appropriate to all things that persist, it has 

 acquired in our modern speech, largely from its use in 

 medical science, a certain particular connotation of oppro- 

 brious import. It suggests something which has lost its 

 useful purpose, and is effete or even dead, persisting among 

 living organisms usually to their detriment. Such is the 

 sense in which many anthropologists seem to use the word 

 in speaking of religious persistences without discriminating 

 between divers kinds of these; and such, still more often, 

 is the connolation which their readers attach to the word 

 in this connection. Yet all religious persistences are not 

 survivals in this pathological sense — nay, the class to which 

 this connotation is suitable includes but a small proportion 

 of the whole. It is to distinguishing these classes of sur- 

 vivals that 1 propose to address myself in the remainder of 

 the time which is allotted to me to-day. 



In the first place there is a most numerous and important 

 body of religious persistences which ought not to be called 

 survivals at all, if that word be used, as it usually is, with 

 a causative implication ; that is to say, there are elements 

 of belief and practice the existence of which in actual cult 

 is not necessarily due at all to the fact that they, or some- 

 thing very closely akin, existed in a previous cult. If 

 religion is the expression of the instinctive desire of man to 

 find an intelligible relation between his own nature and a 

 nature which transcends its limitations, he appears unable 

 to establish that relation by other than a very small and 

 definite number of conceptions ; and among certain races, 

 and indeed in certain geographical areas, those conceptions 

 seem not to vary over immense spaces of time and under 

 successive dispensations. The just way to regard them, 

 therefore, is as falling within categories of thought incvit- 



NO. 1972, VOL. 76] 



ably imposed on the human mind by its humanity and 

 necessary conditions of any religious sense whatever. Man 

 does not form these conceptions because his predecessors 

 formed them, nor indeed because his contemporaries hold 

 them ; but because, as an individual limited by race and 

 environment, he cinnot otherwise satisfy his religious 

 instinct. How important this class is, and how much it 

 includes which has often been discussed by anthropologists 

 under the head of religious survival, may be judged if we 

 recall that there falls under it such an article of belief as 

 the Incarnation of (iod with al! its consequences of expres- 

 sion — the immaculate conception, atoning death, and bodily 

 resurrection. Neither this belief nor any of its expressions, 

 1 need hardly say, make their appearance for the first lime 

 in Christianity. They are to be recognised as forms — 

 necessary categories of creed if you will — under which races 

 of the Nearer East and of other regions of the world also 

 have conceived the relation between the human and the 

 divine as far back as we know anything of their history. 

 I'ut since anthropological knowledge concerning this delicate 

 and difficult instance has been set forth lately in full detail 

 by a distinguished student of religious persistences, Mr. 

 J. G. Frazer, in his " Adonis, Attis, and Osiris," I feel 

 no obligation to deal with it further than to remind you 

 that, apart from all question whether Christian tradition 

 states historical facts in this matter, nothing which Anthro- 

 pology has collected in the way of comparative facts from 

 other creeds serves to place cither this belief or its form 

 of expression among religious sur\'ivals in the narrower 

 sense — that is to say, among religious elements which 

 appear in Christianity merely because they existed in earlier 

 religions. Much accidental circumstance has beyond doubt 

 attached itself to this Christian tenet from the previous 

 cult obser\'ances and ritual of the many races which it has 

 convinced ; and to certain of these I shall call attention 

 presently when I come to deal with another class, more 

 properly to be called religious survivals ; but as for the 

 essentials of the belief, they have as much right to be 

 regarded as independent conceptions of Christianity, 

 despite their earlier appearance in other religions, as 

 history proclaims them to have been endued by Christianity 

 with a wholly new ethical significance. 



But in order to fortify my generalities with a particular 

 example, I may be allowed to deal in brief detail with 

 another, though related, religious conception of the same 

 class, which has not been so exhaustively treated by anthro- 

 pologists. .As a student of Mediterranean races and a fre- 

 quent obsery'er of their actual representatives, I have often 

 been struck by the persistent dominance of femininity in 

 their conception of the Divine, and equally by the distinction 

 which that fact makes between their instinctive creeds and 

 those of other races domiciled contiguous to them, but round 

 an outer radius. In fact, it would not be diflicult to draw 

 a broad frontier line at a certain distance inland round the 

 Mediterranean are.T from the Atlantic to the African deserts, 

 within which u Goddess has always reigned supreme in the 

 hearts of the unsophisticated folk, with a God occupying 

 onlv a subordinate, and often demonstrably a less primaeval, 

 throne ; while without it the God has been dominant and 

 feminine divinity secondary. Within the frontier lie the 

 peninsular and other littoral districts with a broad hinter- 

 land of mountainous or hilly regions. With the 

 great continental plains begins the outer and con- 

 trasted circle. The predominance of a great Nature 

 Goddess among all the races of the East Mediter- 

 ranean basin in the earliest historic time is well 

 known ; and to what had been ascertained of her among 

 the Semites, under her many names, Tanith, AI-Lat, Baalit, 

 Ishtar, Atta, Ashtaroth — these last but variants of one 

 appellation ; among the Nilotic peoples also under many 

 names, e.g., Neith and Isis; among the Anatolian races 

 as the Great Mother, Kybele, Ma, and the unknown 

 " Hittite " title; among the historic inhabitants of Greece 

 and the VEgean as Rhea, Artemis, Britomartis, and a 

 score of other appellations; among the Italic tribes, as 

 Diana or local variants, there has been added latterly the 

 discovery that a Goddess of character and attributes, 

 readily to be compared with those of the Nature deity in 

 various oarls of the surrounding area, was dominant in 

 the religion of that important artistic race w-hich occupied 

 the .'Egean in the prehistoric age, and had so much in- 



