Magic Science and Religion 5 1 



is true, some such similar role must also be played by the whole 

 mortuary ritual. 



The death of a man or woman in a primitive group, consisting 

 of a limited number of individuals, is an event of no mean import- 

 ance. The nearest relatives and friends are disturbed to the depth 

 of their emotional life. A small community bereft of a member, 

 especially if he be important, is severely mutilated. The whole 

 event breaks the normal course of life and shakes the moril founda- 

 tions of society. The strong tendency on which we have insisted 

 in the above description : to give way to fear and horror, to 

 abandon the corpse, to run away from the village, to destroy all 

 the belongings of the dead one — all these impulses exist, and if 

 given way to would be extremely dangerous, disintegrating the 

 group, destroying the material foundations of primitive culture. 

 Death in a primitive society is, therefore, much more than the 

 removal of a member. By setting in motion one part of the deep 

 forces of the instinct of self-preservation, it threatens the very 

 cohesion and solidarity of the group, and upon this depends the 

 organisation of that society, its tradition, and finally the whole 

 culture. For if primitive man yielded always to the disintegrating 

 impulses of his reaction to death, the continuity of tradition and 

 the existence of material civilisation would be made impossible. 



We have seen already how religion, by sacralising and thus 

 standardising the other set of impulses, bestows on man the gift 

 of mental integrity. Exactly the same function it fulfils also 

 with regard to the whole group. The ceremonial of death which 

 ties the survivors to the body and rivets them to the place of death, 

 the beliefs in the existence of the spirit, in its beneficent influences 

 or malevolent intentions, in the duties of a series of commemorative 

 or sacrificial ceremonies — in all this religion counteracts the 

 centrifugal forces of fear, dismay, demoralisation, and provides 

 the most powerful means of reintegration of the group's shaken 

 solidarity and of the re-establishment of its morale. 



In short, religion here assures the victory of tradition and 

 culture over the mere negative response of thwarted instinct. 



With the rites of death we have finished the survey of the main 

 types of religious acts. We have followed the crises of life as the 

 main guiding thread of our account, but as they presented them- 

 selves we also treated the side issues, such as totemism, the cults of 

 food and of propagation, sacrifice and sacrament, the commemora- 



