The origin of man / by Carveth Read.

  • Carveth Read
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin of man / by Carveth Read. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    volent purpose; and, although sometimes fatal by suggestion, is on the whole better than to assassinate. Taboos do more good by protecting person and property and custom than they do harm by restricting the use of food. Belief in imaginary evils waiting upon secret sins exerts, whilst supported by social unanimity, a control upon all kinds of behaviour: it is the beginning of the “religious sanction” and one sort of conscience. The dread of spirits that prowl at night keeps people in the family cave or by the camp-fire; and that is the best place for them. Many rites and observances are sanitary. Totemism rarely does any harm, and may once have usefully symbolized the unity of social groups. Totemic and magical dances give excellent physical training, promote the spirit of co-operation, are a sort of drill; and (like all art), whilst in¬ dulging they also restrain imagination by imposing upon it definite forms. For a long time there was no special profession of wizard or priest, with whose appearance most of the evil of magic and animism originates; though perhaps even they generally do more good than harm by their courage and sagacity, by discovering drugs and poisons, by laying ghosts, and by their primitive studies in surgery, medicine and psychology. § 4. The wizard, however, and the priest, who could never have come into existence but for the prevalent beliefs in Magic and Animism (for of course they did not invent them), and who greatly extend and organize those beliefs, have a further and far more important function in human life, the organization or (rather) reorganization of human society. The organization of the hunting-pack described above was liable, as time went on, from several causes to fall asunder. Some of these causes are obvious: (a) Most important and earliest, I think, was the improvement of weapons and snares and the discovery of poisons which tended to make very small parties, or even single families, self-sufficing—as among the Boschmans (though a whole tribe sometimes assembled for a grand hunt1). 1 G. M. Theal, History and Ethnology of South Africa, p. 11.
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