Early beliefs and their social influence / by Edward Westermarck.

Edvard Westermarck

Date:: 1932

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Early beliefs and their social influence / by Edward Westermarck. Source: Wellcome Collection.

18/200 page 6

certainly sees a difference between events of everyday occurrence or ordinary objects of nature and other events or objects which fill him with a feeling of wonder or mysterious awe. This is testified by language. Words like the Algonkin manitou, the Dakota wakan or wakanda, the Melanesian mana, the Fijian kalou, the Maori atna, the Malagasy ndria?nanitra, the Masai ngai, are used to denote a mysterious force or something wonderful or divine. And the testimony of language is corroborated by facts relating to the nature of those objects which are most commonly worshipped. A great cataract, a difficult and dangerous ford in a river, a spring bubbling up from the ground, a volcano, a high mountain, an isolated rock, a curious or unusually large tree, intoxicants and stimulants, animals of an unusual size or appearance, persons suffering from some abnormality, such as albinoism or madness—all are looked upon by savages with superstitious regard or are propitiated with offerings. That the objects of religious worship, as well as the forces applied in magic, are fundamentally more or less mysterious, awe-inspiring, supernatural, seems to me to be a well-established fact, although it has been disputed. Durkheim asserts that the idea of the mysterious has a place in a small number of advanced religions only, and cannot therefore be regarded as a characteristic of the religious phenomena without excluding from the definition most of the facts which should be defined. But I think that the feeling of mystery and the germ of a distinction between the natural and the supernatural are found even in the lower animal world. The horse fears the whip, but it does not make him shy ; on the other hand, he may shy

digitised image 1

digitised image 2

digitised image 3