August 15, 1907] 



NATURE 



401 



muttering prayers before an icon of the \'irgin. It struck 

 me she was no Copt, and I put a question to the monk 

 who acted as guide. He shrugged his shoulders apologetic- 

 ally : ■■ She is of the Muslamin," he said. " Her son is 

 very ill. Why should she not? Who knows? " 



Finally, let me return to Ephesus, whose cult with its 

 environment I have peculiar reason to know. A phenomenon 

 has taken place there latterly which illustrates singularly 

 well both kinds of religious transference, the conscious and 

 the tmconscious. About fifteen years ago a Catholic priest 

 of Smyrna who had been reading Clement Brentano's " Life 

 of the \'irgin," which is based on visions of the German 

 mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, and contains the story 

 that Mary accompanied St. John to Ephesus, lodged in 

 a dwelling at some distance from the city, and there 

 died — a belief which we know from the French traveller 

 Tournefort to have been held locally two centuries ago — 

 identified the holy house with a ruined building, standinr 

 above a spring in the southern hills, and dedicated by the 

 Orthodox Church to Panaghia Kapouli — Our I^ady of the 

 (iate. He succeeded in buying the site and much ground 

 about it, fenced it in, found the gardens which the X'irgin 

 had fended, and the path with its stations by which she 

 had climbed daily to Calvary on the hill-top, and when 1 

 was there was sanguine of finding also her tomb. He pro- 

 claimed his discoveries far and wide and instituted two pil- 

 grimages which now draw thousands of Catholics every year 

 on the Wednesday in Easter week and in the octave of the 

 .Assumption. So far we are considering a conscious revival, 

 located by a coincidence at the great Asiatic seat of the 

 pagan Virgin Goddess. But there is a stranger coinci- 

 dence of which the good priest was not conscious. The 

 holy house stands far from all villages or haunts of men 

 at the head of that same glen of Ortygia where we know, 

 from Strabo and Tacitus, stood the original shrine of the 

 great Ephesian Mother. It stands too on obviously earlier 

 foundations, and, as I have said, over an Aghiasma, as it 

 is called, that is, a holy spring. Indeed, very possibly it 

 occupies the actual site of the Ortygian temple. How did 

 this coincidence coine aboul ? On this wise. When search- 

 ing the Ephesian district the Smyrniote priest asked the 

 Orthodox peasants for places sacred to the Virgin, and was 

 directed to this in the glen as the most holy of all. It 

 had been, in fact, a place of pilgriinages and of inter- 

 cession for the sick, for rain and fertility, and for the easy 

 delivery of women as far back as local tradition ran. This 

 it had been because it was Ortygia, though the villagers 

 of Kirkinii and .Arvalia knew it not. In virtue of that 

 fact the priest anoropriated it, though he never suspected 

 the identity: and thither the faithful flock twice a year, 

 even less aware of, but none the less compelled by, the 

 persistent sanctity of Ortygia. 



Such, then, are the religious survivals which are not 

 survivals at all in what may be called the pathological 

 sense, not, that is to say, elements in actual religion which 

 have survived their utility in this system ; and such should 

 not, I urge, be treated by anthropologists w-ithout explicit 

 reference to the fact that they arc as full of meaning, as 

 vital, and as necessary in actual cult as ever they were. 

 They offer not so much examples of the conservatism of 

 religion — a much used phrase of slightly contemptuous im- 

 plication — as of the identiiv of the religious sense through- 

 out the life of particular races and within certain geo- 

 graphical areas, and of the necessary conditions and limita- 

 tions of its expression. They claim all the respect and 

 tenderness of treatment due to beliefs w'hich still make 

 part of the foundations of our social order, and cannot be 

 impaired or cut away, like a pathological survival, without 

 the provision of substitutes equally efficient. Even when 

 the rudest beliefs of primitive and simple folk are dealt 

 with, maxima dcbetur piicris rcvcrcntia ; and much, be it 

 remembered, in the content of these great classes of re- 

 ligious persistences is concerned with the belief of folk who 

 are by no means simple or primitive. 



There remains, of course, an immense body of religious 

 persistences which are more or less rightly to be regarded 

 as survivals in the ordinary pathological sense, beliefs, 

 observances, and rites, that is, which have indeed survived 

 from earlier religious systems, and have lost or are losing 

 their meaning, because thev express nothing necessary or 



NO. 1972, VOL. 76] 



vital to the religious sense. So far as this class includes 

 beliefs at all, these are of the kind which are called super- 

 stitions, and I venture, despite the reluctance of some 

 anthropologists to admit a definite distinction between 

 religion and superstition, to maintain that there is such a 

 distinction, and that it is just this, that superstition in- 

 cludes only those beliefs which are held wholly or chiefly 

 because they have always been held ; which are, in effect, 

 results of earlier religious systems, or survivals in the 

 narrower pathological sense of the word. Some religious 

 beliefs may be survivals in the wider sense ; all super- 

 stitious beliefs are survivals Jn the narrower sense. 



The most numerous content of the class, however, is 

 composed of observances and ceremonies. These may often 

 persist as pathological survivals in connection with beliefs 

 of the really religious kind. The object of cult may be a 

 survival of the necessary and vital class, as, for example, 

 the Virgin mother ; but the particular place and inanner 

 of her worship may be conditioned by survivals of the 

 pathologic sort. The persistence of local sanctity supplies 

 the most obvious illustration of the latter kind of survival. 

 For instance, while the consideration of many holy places 

 to Christendoin is due to events or traditions of Christian 

 history itself, to connection with the Gospel story or with 

 early preachers, teachers, or other saints, to reputed 

 epiphanies, and so forth, a much greater number owe the 

 fact that they are still frequented by the pious to reasons 

 of which the pious have not the dimmest consciousness, 

 often to features of pre-Christian Nature-worship-— to rocks 

 or springs, or even objects which may have perished long 

 ago, like sacred trees. What Greek votary in the shrines 

 oif St. George or St. Elias could give a satisfactory account 

 of either of those saints, deinonslrate their place in the 

 history of his Church, or say why their shrines stand in 

 certain valleys or on certain peaks of the hills? We often 

 know better than he ; for we can say definitely that many 

 of these saints of the Orthodox Church and of Islam, 

 whose churches and tombs dot the Nearer East, have never 

 died because they never lived, but are the unsubstantial 

 shadows of old gods, clinging to the sites of shrines and 

 groves whence their names perished long ago with the 

 victory of the Galilean. 



The particularism, which communities — village, tribal, 

 urban, and even national — display all the world over, has 

 had, of course, much to do with local persistence of sanc- 

 tity. A small body, blessed with a private deity of its 

 verv own for uncounted centuries, who has been identified 

 with its particular interests, and has favoured it in its 

 inultifarious local feuds, will not readily resign it for a 

 deitv of more general jurisdiction. If it accepts the 

 Christian \'irgin in place of a pagan goddess, she will be 

 the Virgin of that particular community, unconnected with 

 anv other Virgin, and in full sympathy with the insults 

 which Latin peasants, for example, will heap upon the 

 Madonna of the rival village across the valley. Indeed, 

 an indistinctive distrust of and disinclination to accept an 

 impartial god is characteristic of all imperfect humanity, 

 and lies beneath the sectarianism which has been promptly 

 and continuouslv developed within the pale of all the great 

 universal religions — for instance, in both Islam and Chris- 

 tianity. The omnipresent, omniscient Deity is too far 

 removed, too catholic, too vague. Man ever desires to 

 focus divine attention on a smaller area, to establish for 

 himself some preference in the eyes of his God ; and, even 

 w-hen most anxious to bring the rest of the world into 

 the fold, he often most jealously reserves to his own 

 communitv the distinction of a Chosen People. 



This great and well-known class of observances and 

 rites, which represent true pathologic religious survivals, 

 supplies the bulk of the matter of all the great treatises 

 written on cult by anthropologists, such as those, for 

 example, of Mannh'ardt and Botticher on Tree-worship, as 

 well as others to which I have already referred, and many 

 more. With this class the anthropologist can deal freely. 

 In the others it seems reasonable that he should move 

 with greater reserve ; and I venture to think that he will 

 best avoid offence if he keep clearly in his own mind, 

 and as clearly before his readers, the main distinction 

 between the classes of religious survivals, which, quite 

 independently of my presentation of it, is real, vital, and 

 of momentous significance. 



