Pagan & Christian creeds : their origin and meaning / by Edward Carpenter.

  • Edward Carpenter
Date:
[1920]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pagan & Christian creeds : their origin and meaning / by Edward Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lion, the fleet ness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerise a whole tribe. Reinach points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed themselves under the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly or wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future. “ Diodorus,” he says, distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was venerated because it foretold the future,” [Birds generally act as weather-prophets.] “ In Australia and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl prenionish their fellow clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far as to rear owls for their prophetic qualities in war.” [The jackal, or ‘ pathfinder ’ —whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a food- animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have a value of this kind.] “ This use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realised that the senses of animals were acuter than their own ; nor is it surprising that they should have expected their totems—that is to say, their natural allies—to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those provisions of nature, wells especially, which animals seem to scent by instinct.” ^ And again, beyond all this, I have little doubt that there are sub¬ conscious affinities which unite certain tribes to certain animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though they are very real—the same affinities that we recognise as existing between individual persons and certain objects of nature. W. H. Hudson—himself in many respects having this deep and primitive relation to nature—speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical volume 2 of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy, not only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular flowering-plant “ not more I See Reinach, Eng. trails., op. cit., pp. 20, 21. 3 Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.
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