Magic Science and Religion 25 



with " the social." For " in a general way ... a society has 

 all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the Divine in minds, 

 merely by the power that it has over them ; for to its members 

 it is what a God is to its worshippers." ^ Professor Durkheim 

 arrives at this conclusion by the study of totemism, which he 

 believes to be the most primitive form of religion. In this the 

 " totemic principle " which is identical with mana and with " the 

 God of the clan . . . can be nothing else than the clan itself." 2 



These strange and somewhat obscure conclusions will be 

 criticised later, and it will be shown in what consists the grain 

 of truth they undoubtedly contain and how fruitful it can be. It 

 has borne fruit, in fact, in influencing some of the most important 

 writings of mixed classsical scholarship and anthropology, to 

 mention only the works of Miss Jane Harrison and Mr. Cornford. 



The third great subject introduced into the Science of Religion 

 by Sir James Frazer is that of the cults of vegetation and fertility. 

 In " The Golden Bough," starting from the awful and mysterious 

 ritual of the wood divinities at Nemi, we are led through an 

 amazing variety of magical and religious cults, devised by man to 

 stimulate and control the fertilising work of skies and earth and 

 of sun and rain, and we are left with the impression that early 

 religion is teeming with the forces of savage life, with its young 

 beauty and crudity, with its exuberance and strength so violent 

 that it leads now and again to suicidal acts of self-immolation. 

 The study of " The Golden Bough " shows us that for primitive 

 man death has meaning mainly as a step to resurrection, decay as 

 a stage of re-birth, the plenty of autumn and the decline of winter 

 as preludes to the revival of spring. Inspired by these passages 

 of " The Golden Bough " a number of writers have developed, 

 often with greater precision and with a fuller analysis than by 

 Frazer himself, what could be called the vttalistic view of religion. 

 Thus Mr. Crawley in his " Tree of Life," M. van Gennep in 

 his " Rites de Passage," and Miss Jane Harrison in several works, 

 have given evidence that faith and cult spring from the crises of 

 human existence, " the great events of life, birth, adolescence, 

 marriage, death ... it is about these events that religion 

 largely focusses." ^ The tension of instinctive need, strong 

 emotional experiences, lead in some way or other to cult and belief. 



^ The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p . 206 . 

 * Ibid. ' J. Harrison, Themis, p. 42. 



