52 Science Religion and Reality 



tive cults of ancestors and the cults of the spirits. To one type 

 already mentioned we still have to return — I mean, the seasonal 

 feasts and ceremonies of communal or tribal character — and to the 

 discussion of this subject we proceed now. 



IV 



The Public and Tribal Character of Primitive Cults 



The festive and public character of the ceremonies of cult is 

 a conspicuous feature of religion in general. Most sacred acts 

 happen in a congregation ; indeed, the solemn conclave of the 

 faithful united in prayer, sacrifice, supplication, or thanksgiving 

 is the very prototype of a religious ceremony. Religion needs the 

 community as a whole so that its members may worship in common 

 its sacred things and its divinities, and society needs religion for the 

 maintenance of moral law and order. 



In primitive societies the public character of worship, the give- 

 and-take between religious faith and social organisation, is at least 

 as pronounced as in higher cultures. It is sufficient to glance 

 over our previous inventory of religious phenomena to see that 

 ceremonies at birth, rites of initiation, mortuary attentions to 

 the dead, burial, the acts of mourning and commemoration, 

 sacrifice and totemic ritual, are one and all public and collective, 

 frequently affecting the tribe as a whole and absorbing all its 

 energies for the time being. This public character, the gathering 

 together of big numbers, is especially pronounced in the annual 

 or periodical feasts held at times of plenty, at harvest or at the 

 height of the hunting or fishing season. Such feasts allow the 

 people to indulge in their gay mood, to enjoy the abundaruce of 

 crops and quarry, to meet their friends and relatives, to muster 

 the whole community in full force, and to do all this in a mood of 

 happiness and harmony. At times during such festivals visits of 

 the departed take place : the spirits of ancestors and dead, relatives 

 return and receive offerings and sacrificial libations, mingle with 

 the survivors in the acts of cult and in the rejoicings of the feast. 

 Or the dead, even if they do not actually revisit the suvivors, are 

 commemorated by them, usually in the form of ancestor cult. 

 Again, such festivities being frequently held embody the ritual of 

 garnered crops and other cults of vegetation. But whatever "the 

 other issues of such festivities, there can be no doubt that religion 



