The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett.

  • Robert Ranulph Marett
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    down to sleep will explain to the skin exactly what he wants, and beg the spirit to send him a propitious dream.1 Or in other cases mere association and coincidence will pave the way towards an animistic version of the facts. Thus I have no doubt that it is the uncanny appearance of the snake, combined with its habit of frequenting graves and of entering dwellings, which has led more than one savage people to treat it as the chosen incarnation of their ancestral ghosts.2 And here let me leave this part of the subject, having thus barely touched upon it in order to confirm the single point that religious awe is towards powers, and that these are not necessarily spirits or ghosts, though they tend to become so. At length we reach what I have roughly described as the proper domain and parent-soil of animism, namely, the phenomena that have to do with dream and trance, disease and death. Here the question for us must be, Do supernaturalism and animism originally coincide in respect to these phenomena? Or, in other words, Is the awful, in each and all of them alike, primarily soul or spirit? My own belief is that the two spheres do not originally coin- cide, that the awful in dream and trance is at first distinct from the awful in death and disease, though the former readily comes to overlay and colour the latter. Thus I conceive that the trance-image, alike on account of its singularity, its accompaniments in the way of physical no less than mental derange- 1 Hose, /. A. /., xxiii. 159. 2 E.g., Zulus, cf. Macdonald, J. A. /., xx. 122 ; Malagasy, cf. Sibree, /. A. /., xxi. 227.
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